Re: Mi vs C

Jon,

I doubt that most of us that still mess with MI do it for efficiency. It's more a labour of love, or a hobby (as with me), or simply nostalgia for the old Sys/38 days when "we could work anywhere in the country".

It's instructive to have some knowledge of MI just to be able to better understand what goes on under the covers. But of course, I would not want to write in MI for hardly any practical purpose anymore. Just to open a display file and do simple IO is a LOT of work!

Rich Hart

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Paris" <Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <mi400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 12:48 PM
Subject: Re: [MI400] Mi vs C (was calling RPG ILE with parameter list fromMI)

On 10-Dec-07, at 1:00 PM, James Lampert wrote:

My predecessors had already done
much to both optimize it and make it more readable, but I still
ended up
spending over a year going through it, one subroutine at a time, to
optimize it for space, speed, and maintainability.

This got me thinking. Has anyone here done any tests to compare the
execution speed of MI programs vs comparable C programs? IBM doesn't
write in MI any more and by sticking with MI you lose most of the
optimization options that are available to ILE programs. The vast
majority of MI instructions are surfaced in the C compiler and if I
recall correctly are not called as functions (as they would be if
called from RPG) but replaced by in-line code streams which should be
a lot more efficient.

C code has to be a lot more maintainable than MI and there are many
more tools to work with it.

SO is there really any reason to use MI for new code? Does it really
perform any better?

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com


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