AS scalability [Re: Parents/Child Scripts]
AS scalability [Re: Parents/Child Scripts]
- Subject: AS scalability [Re: Parents/Child Scripts]
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 16:21:15 +0100
Erik Price wrote:
>
> I think this same argument can be applied to just about anything that
>
> goes
>
> beyond simple "pull the email from Entourage and dump it into FMP" type
>
> scripting. There's so many things about AS that make it a horror to
>
> scale.
>
> All the same, I think it still scales to a sufficient level to be "good
>
> enough" for many tasks.
>
>
I'm kind of worried about this.
Oops, please don't panic. What I mean is that the language itself doesn't
scale well to huge complex programs that scrunch vast amounts of data
internally [1]. For something like thumbnail generation, this is never
going to be a problem: not unless you plan to implement a ground-up,
byte-by-byte image thrashing system that resizes a thousand files
simultaneously. ;)
Assuming what you really intend to do is use AS to drive a copy of
Photoshop 7 (not write your own version of PS in it:), you won't have any
problems with "scalability" and all this other scary-sounding stuff us
"50000-LOC-and-counting" maniacs are throwing around. <g>
Cheers,
has
[LOC = lines of code]
[1] Memory is rarely an issue in itself with AS (the famous exceptions are
certain string operations which are limited to 32KB). If you've got the
RAM, it's not a problem. The real problem with munging large amounts of
data is that AS isn't as fast as Perl isn't as fast as C isn't as fast as
Assembler. The question then is: "What's fast enough?"
Also, lack of things like multi-threading mean it's not so hot at stuff
like CGI, as it can only handle one request at a time.
Finally, its tendency to run into certain annoying internal limitations -
stack overflows when converting strings into lists > 4000 items, and table
overflows when trying to save really complex custom objects to disk - can
be a real pain, requiring workarounds and redesigns when all you want is
for it all to Just Work.
Still, we live in hope that the next AS Update will always be Better... <g>
--
http://www.barple.connectfree.co.uk/ -- The Little Page of Beta AppleScripts
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