Hey,

How do you handle the enormous compiling times of Lite-C (with big projects - code size above 512 KB)? Or better said: Do you also have the problem that the starting of your code (in unpublished mode) needs more than 2 minutes, while the same code needed just 3-4 (!!!) seconds in WDL (also with the latest beta)?

I'm generally a step-by-step programmer and must therefore check my code (by starting the engine) very very often, but this seems just to be impossible if I have more than 1 minute waiting-time EVERY start (and at the end see a syntax error). And this happens on a very good computer (3GB RAM, 4200+ CPU). I'm asking myself, how the situation is on other worse systems.

Recently Lukas wrote in the Beta-Forum:

Quote:

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40 seconds for 1MB Code? You're lucky! My 526KB code needs 20 minutes!

One Programming hour:
1. Small changes in my script.
2. Compiling for 20 minutes
3. Being happy because of a syntax error because of a typo
4. correcting typo
5. compiling again...
6. Having a party because it doesn't work correctly
7. correcting script
8. Compliling again
9. It works... after one hour!

And this is how I have to make 3D-Tetris 2

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Actually it is the very same for me..
10 minutes of checking a from wdl to lite-c converted code for errors

• Wait 40 seconds for compiling => syntax error
  
• Wait 40 seconds for compiling => see very very easy to fix error
  
• Fix in 10 second
  
• Wait 40 seconds for compiling => see difficult to fix error
  
• Code the first try to fix the bug: 1 minute
  
• Wait 40 seconds for compiling => bug is worse than before
  
• Code the second try to fix the bug: another minute
  
• Wait 40 seconds for compiling => works, but still a small bug
  
• fix small bug in 20 seconds
  
• Wait 40 seconds for compiling
  

=> 240 seconds waiting for compiling, 150 seconds for coding.. Is this workflow? no.. The result is a complete demotivation.. (how worse must be the situation for lukas whose code needs 20 minutes to compile - which is not a joke by the way).

Does this mean that you can not use Lite-C with big projects?
How do you programm efficiently with big projects (>512 KB) in Lite-C?
What do you do while the computer is compiling? Drinking coffee?

Could everybody who realized a big project with lite-c please comment how to get an acceptable workflow also with big code sizes?

thanks for answers,
Timo Stark

PS: This should not be a protest post against lite-C. Lite-C is needed and a good programming language. But in my opinion it is not useable in big projects in its current state.

i am currently porting a c-script project to lite-c and this concerns me aswell. i hope this will get fixed soon. at the moment i am just at about 100kb of code so everything still is fine but in the end it probably will be between 500kb and 1000kb.

im anderen thread hat jcl geschrieben:

Quote:

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Normalerweise ist die Compilierzeit proportional zur Codelänge. Aufgrund eines Konzeptionsfehlers in der Verwaltung von Konstanten hat lite-C jedoch eine Compilierzeit, die unter bestimmten Umständen nichtlinear mit der Zahl der Konstanten in Funktionen ansteigt. Das war der Grund für die minutenlange Compilierzeit Ihres alten GameEdit Codes und wird in einem der nächsten Updates korrigiert.

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was ist denn mit konstanten genau gemeint? defines (z.b. für skills)?

hey ventilator,

yes you might get into problems very soon. actually it gets worse at about 200kb of code, and gets REALLY worse with about 500 KB depending on your computer hardware and software.
I've never experienced any connections between constants and compiling time, but Lukas ensured me that the compiling times of his program sank from 20 minutes to 19.5 minutes within the latest beta. A great success
Maybe we should contact jcl for further questions if there are enough people who have the same problem.

As i already said, in the todays form the compiling times of lite-c are dissatisfying and make the use of lite-c in big projects impossible. But i might be wrong, that's why I opened this thread to get opinions of other members of this community BEFORE i talk with jcl again about this issue.

thanks for your post and please stay in contact with me if you get any further problems while converting your code to clite.
Timo Stark

We are working on a VR-Simulator project and were facing the same problem when we started to migrate our C-Script code to lite-C.
A colleague of mine wrote a thread about that a while ago, unfortunately in german: "Kompilierzeit light-c "
http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/sho...true#Post802631
We have a lot of routines in this project which have to be fine-tuned. This requires compiling and starting the application each time after a few tweaks in the code.
While the starting process took about 10 seconds in C-Script it raised to 5:30 minutes after the migration. Just to mention: almost all the code was in one main file with about 12.000 lines of code (app. 350 kb).
For this reason it was not possible to continue developing anymore.

So we thought about taking single routines out of the main file and transfer it temporarily to a small dummy application.

In doing that the first step was to transfer all interface elements to a separate file. So we ended up in two main files, each of them with about 6.000 lines of code.

Big surprise: only by doing that the compiling times reduced from 5:30 minutes to 20 seconds, which is a factor of 16!

We do not know why that happened, as the code is the same.

Thank you for your comment andibeh. Sadfully your tip doesn't help in my case.
Could anyone else who converted big projects or who wrote big bunches of code in Lite-C (>512KB) post his experiences with compiling times?

"For this reason it was not possible to continue developing anymore."

yes..

I converted IntenseX to Lite-c about a month ago. 878k of code compiles in about 9 secs. It used to be faster in c-script, but i don't mind the couple of extra seconds, as long as the .exe will still run at a descent speed. So I guess it's not really the volume of code, but certain elements in it that my code is missing, or yours and Lukas have a lot of..

I use a Pentium D 3.4gh with 2gigs of ram on XP

This thread gives me concerns too. Thinking of transfering code from A6 to A7 Lite-c. I also have 800k+ code at the moment and noticed a considerable change going from about 5 sec to over a 3 minutes compile/load time with the A6 when I included entity pointer string arrays initializtion code. Specifically, I added code that looked in specific directories and added any hmp and mdl file names present to string arrays that are used to hold the names of files available for loading. Nothing fancy. The hmp and mdl files themselves were not loaded by code though, just their names saved. I have not looked into the reason yet why this occurs and it may or may not be related to the compile time issue discussed here. Thought I'd mention it anyway.

cheers