VB & PB/DLL

[Erwin van de Wiel]

We are currently developing in vb and we are developing a larger application that is using a lot of COM objects. In order to make full use of the -n tier we have to make extensive use of arrays (Variants!) and a lot of data traffic.
As we understand PB/DLL makes a better use of resources and speeds things up a lot! Is there support for PB/DLL and ADO ?

1. Are the resources which PB/DLL uses less then the one VB uses? We
already saw the comparisons with vb, but does somebody have some "real-
life" experience with the speed of PB/DLL in combination with VB, the
small examples show a lot already but is it also effective on larger
applications ? The overhead the current calls to VB Com objects gives
us is to much for us this time.

2. The application we're developing is using a lot of data-traffic with a
SQL Server. What we want to know (we never worked with PB/DLL) is that
the performance of the PB/DLL in combination with VB and SQL Server
speeds things up in comparison with only VB and SQL Server.

We were impressed by the speed PB/DLL gives on paper and we probably want to buy the package, but we want to be sure that the language gives us better performance in larger applications.

Erwin van de Wiel
ANOA Software
The Netherlands.

[Tim Wisseman]

I ported a 30,000 line program that does data processing from VB 5 to
PowerBasic DLL. The program is pure basic, just UDTs and Arrays, with no important calls to outside DLLs, or SQL.

Under VB the program would take 11 minutes to finish processing. The PowerBasic version would finish the same data in 23 seconds. That is about
2800% faster, for a real world app.

The PB program is 564K in size and the VB version of the program is 2.4 meg.

The PB program does not require any runtime DLL's like VB does, so the
PB program uses far less memory.

Tim Wisseman