Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
The last post covered optimization in general. In this post you’ll look at a specific optimization called “loop unrolling”.
This is the seventh post in our Compiler series. Other posts:
Like his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.
Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.
That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech, none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.
Comments closedIn honor of Pi Day 2018, Xojo Pi licenses will be free! Xojo Pi licenses allow you to build console apps for Linux ARM for use with Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3.
Comments closedEvery once in a while we get a question or post like this one that wonders why a loop might turn into an infinite loop or why it doesn’t behave as expected and stop when the loop reaches the limit.
Comments closedAs developers, we often like to have things set up and configured in our own way and our favorite IDE itself, Xojo, is certainly no exception. Xojo allows you to customize it in lots of way but today I want to talk about theming the IDE, or specifically the code editor.
Xojo has always had the ability to customize colors of tokens in the code editor. For example, you can open up Xojo’s Preferences and change the colors of keywords, strings, comments and much more, as well as the font and font size. Other than making things look pretty, there are practical reasons for doing all of this. You may find certain themes are easier on your eyes, especially as you age. Or you may want to have one color scheme for daytime, such as a light background with bright colors for the tokens, and a different color scheme for late night coding, such as a dark grey background with more subdued token colors.
Comments closedAs the old joke goes, “There are 10 types of people, those that understand how binary numbers work and those that don’t.” Let’s get you into the “understand” group.
Comments closedA wonderful perk of Xojo’s virtual office is getting to spend the day with our favorite people, and by people I mean pets.
Having a pet in your office provides a friendly, positive diversion, which is excellent for employee morale, pets can also increase productivity and their presence in the workplace has been proven to reduce stress. Pets help us working-from-home workaholics step away and take a sanity break. So take a minute and have some eyebleach on us. Meet the Xojo office pets!
Comments closedA recent thread on the forums discussed why a particular bit of code would not compile he felt the error message seemed less than helpful: “CRghtColr As Color = Color.RGBA(000,061,255,208)”.
Comments closedI’ve heard it several times: how can I export to PDF from Xojo? Sure, there are lots of answers pointing to a bunch of resources, including excellent plug-ins from third parties. But can you accomplish the same thing using an already available API? Yes, there is a remote API for that! The requirement is that your Xojo app will need to have access to Internet … and, of course, you’ll need to do just a bit of coding.
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