Re: TRichView vs. WpTools

Author

Message

Louis Kessler

Posted: 02/20/2002 17:21:25

"Giovanni Premuda" <[email protected]> wrote in message

news:[email protected]...

> How does TRichEdit compare with wpTools? I am using wptools in my projects

> since version 1, but it is still buggy, bulky and feels quite unpolished,

> and the author seems interested in adding more features instead of

streamlining

> the component. But till now I have found it to be the only solution for my

> needs. Now I see that TRichEdit implements tables, and this is the feature

> I need most.

In January 2000, I purchased RichEdit. But back then (a very early version)

it was missing some features that I needed, the major one being Tables.

So then in March 2000, I tried WpTools and I was actually quite impressed by

it, so I purchased it. But after a few weeks of implementing with it, I

discovered a major problem. It was very slow for large files and consumed

huge amounts of memory. At that time, I did the following comparison.

To load a 4 MB text file (on my Pentium III-600 with 128 MB RAM):

1. WPTools Wordpad Demo: 40 seconds, 40 to 90 MB RAM used.

2. RichView Editor Demo: 20 seconds, 11 MB used.

3. Delphi's sample RichEdit Demo: 1 second, 9 MB used. (The Windows RichEdit

control is very fast! However, it is missing some very important features

such as hyperlinks, graphics, etc.)

4. WordPad (that comes with Windows): 1 second, 13 MB used. (This is of course

basically the Windows RichEdit control).

5. UltraEdit: instantaneous, 2 MB used. (UltraEdit is the text editor I use.

It is unbelievably fast - I don't know how they do it. But of course, it only

handles unformatted text.)

When I first started developing my program, I was hoping to get speed similar

to what Window's RichEdit control provides. I understood that I would be

sacrificing a bit of speed for extra capabilities. But I never expected that

I would be faced with the memory problems that WPTools was causing me. I

needed to get RAM usage down to hopefully no more than 3 times the size of the

file I was reading. But WPTools used over 10 times as much!

I had several excellent discussions about this with Julian Ziersch, and I must

say that he was doing everything to help me. But in the end, his explanation

was that the memory consumption is caused by the WPTools concept of storing

items on a character-by-character basis. He said that he would not be able to

improve this for formatted text. To his credit, he gave me a full refund for

WpTools since I would be unable to use it.

In May 2000, after doing this timing and memory analysis, I went back to

RichView. Looking in more detail at why it took 20 seconds to load in the 4

MB file, and I was able to find the bottleneck in the formatting code and then

work with Sergey to reduce the load time from 20 seconds down to 4 seconds.

RichView was still slower than the Windows RichEdit control but was now

something I could work with. Sergey added a wonderful implementation of

Tables a few months later is continuing to add important features and provide

great support.

For what its worth, that's my experience.

Louis Kessler

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

E-mail: [email protected]

Website: www.lkessler.com