scourt2000 wrote: > I've been playing around with some "other charting packages" out > there and there's one theme that runs through all of them: if the > charting package is based on .Net, it's going to be a performance > dog compared to a C++ native code-programmed app. > > THANK YOU Tomasz for not getting on the .Net bandwagon. For real- > time stock market and futures charting, it may be easier to program > in C# than C++, but your end-users will suffer the consquences of > that decision. > > It won't matter when computers are twice as fast as they are now, > but now, there's a noticeable difference in performance and > responsiveness. I'm not even talking about being clever about > backtesting speed-ups and the like. I'm talking about basic data > retrieval, plotting and user manipulation of the charts. > > Anyway, had to get that out of my system. Kudos to you Tomasz!
Generally, the tool is as good as the hands that wield it. Before AmiBroker, I had a couple of custom tools which I'd written in .NET which included a custom charting component which was deadly fast. I left my own tools to collect dust because my time trades for a significant premium over $229. The amount of time I spent making my charting component faster than greased lightning was at the expense of time spent doing worthwhile research. .NET can also draw in plain old COM components. TeeChart, long the gold standard for charting components, releases its WinForms .NET as a simple .NET wrapper. The problem with "some other charting packages" is they have likely used open-source components like nChart, which are great for displaying static charts, but are too slow for displaying large data sets which update frequently. I think you can even pull in the Excel charting component. It was not too long ago that I recall the great debate about how C++ was so slow compared to C... New programming tools tend to used to create less efficient programs, and that improves as programmers' understanding increases. It turns out that everyone complaining about C++ speed were passing massive templated data structures by value instead of reference, and C++ wasn't actually the catalyst for the second coming. Corollary: most programmers are crap. Regards, Matt