I develop on macOS, but the Windows apps produced run very slow in comparison with the same macOS applications. I don’t care about the IDE speed, just the final EXE application.
If I am willing to sacrifice flickering for speed, what is the best Xojo version to use 2016r3, 2017r3 or something else?
2016R3 is the version just before Direct2D which I currently use. Much faster than the current beta, but indeed, you got to make sure not to stack controls, or it does flicker.
Also, you may want to look at the work of who has produced a flicker reduction method that actually works. Unfortunately, there are so many topics about flicker, it is now lost in a see of posts.
With some luck, Julian will chime in.
@Michel Bujardet thank you. I have read all those ‘flicker’ posts and did not want those issues to be discussed again here! I am trying to build my Windows desktop app with a number of older Xojo versions to see if the speed improvement is minor or substantial.
I have a colleague testing my app on a Lenovo Windows Home 10 laptop and the speed of the app on his laptop, using the latest Xojo, is truely glacial compared with both macOS and Parallels Windows 10 Professional VM that I run.
Add a string array to your app.
Append a line to that array in the window’s Paint event, holding the event name and the time (or ticks)
(Maybe also in the paint event of a canvas or two if you have those on screen)
When the app closes, save that array to disc as a log file.
My experience is that Windows paints the window much more often than Mac, especially if controls are stacked or near each other.
You may be shocked to see how fast the Paints are called.
A few years back , before a wholesale cull of ‘refresh’ from the app, I found that I was getting 30/40 calls to Paint per second on Windows, and 2 on the Mac.
This doesnt address actual code execution… tight loops… disc access etc
The way to test those is similar:
Log before the time consuming code, log afterwards.
Then compare ‘before and after’ times between Windows and Mac.
I have users reporting the same thing.
GFX drivers and paged memory most likely culprits if the speed varies between Windows machines
Oddly, sometimes I found speed increases by turning DOWN the graphics acceleration features on some machines