Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24454571-20140129145125/@comment-9531161-20140201060010

How fast is Petit Computer? Type this into a program: T=MAINCNTL FOR I=1 TO 100000 NEXT PRINT 100000/(MAINCTL-T)

Run the program and view the number... it's roughly 1000. What this means is that an EMPTY for loop can run 1000 iterations per frame (1/60th of a second), or 60000 iterations per second. Keep in mind this is an EMPTY for loop with absolutely no code in it. To put this into perspective, the IBM System/370 from 1972 could have executed this loop 1282 times per frame, assuming the worst possible conditions. This means that Petit Computer will usually be out-performed by a 40+ year old computer in terms of "user" processing power. This doesn't mean that Petit Computer has the capabilities of a 40 year old computer, it just means that if you try to program some of these functions yourself (like sprite collision), you'll be stuck in lag land. This is because a program has to be interpreted, which takes a very long time. Everything you type incurs a huge performance penalty. On top of this, even after the code is interpreted, it has to get through the Petit Computer framework before actually performing the code. However, a Petit Computer function can bypass all of this, because a Petit Computer function (like SPCOL) can run machine code which almost directly performs what you wanted. This means a Petit Computer function could be completed 100 or even 1000 times faster than if you tried to code it yourself; even if you came up with a better way to do it.