Dll caching...

[JockoDundee]

It’s true that _IsPressed(“01”) is significantly sped up when a dll is specified as a second optional argument, which is especially beneficial when called in a loop repeatedly.

Yet, other UDF functions typically have no such parameter. 
Is that because there is little benefit, or because they keep any dlls cached statically?

 

[Nine]

Not sure we should call it significant.  I tested both with $hDLL (coming from DllOpen) and the usual "user32.dll" and it shows that with the handle it is close to 25% faster after 5000 calls.  Not bad if you look only at the percentage.

But the fact is that it's only 13ms faster.  Divided by 5000 it is a gain of 0.0026ms per call (not really significant IMO).  On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to specify it.

Recently we tested DllCall using an handle and without.  There was only few ms between both.  Maybe @pixelsearch can confirm cause I can't seem to find the thread.  There was a nice explanation from M23 too.  Anyway, the conclusion was that there is not much of an advantage to open DLL especially if it is a largely used DLL.  

[Melba23]

Hi,

The thread and post mentioned by Nine:

M23

[JockoDundee]

Yes, I agree after running a few tests, only a very modest benefit from using a pre-opened dll.

One other question though, if anyone has insight.  The underscore indicates that _IsPressed is not part of the core language, is that correct?  Does that mean it wasn’t in the original language, or?  

Ok, I lied, one other question about dlls, quite a number of solutions posted in this forum seem to rely on DllOpen and DllCall and setting up structs correctly to get stuff in and out of them.

But once somebody works out how to call the dll function properly, is there a way for them to just put a wrapper on it and add it to the collection?  Is that what the WinApi stuff is?

Thanks in advance.
 

 

[boom221]

You can look for yourself. They are in the Include folder of your AutoIT installation. But yeah, they are wrappers around dllcalls so that we can live in the matrix of cute function calls.

[Melba23]

JockoDundee,

Quote

The underscore indicates that _IsPressed is not part of the core language, is that correct?  Does that mean it wasn’t in the original language, or?

Core AutoIt functions do not have a leading underscore (e.g. FileReadToArray) while those that do (e.g. _FileReadToArray) are written in pure AutoIt and can be found in the standard UDF libraries - look in the "Include" folder of your AutoIt installation.

You might also come across functions with a double leading underscore - these are by convention "Internal Use Only" functions within a UDF. Meddle with them at your peril!

Quote

 just put a wrapper on it and add it to the collection?  Is that what the WinApi stuff is?

That is entirely correct - the "_WinAPI_*" functions are syntactic sugar for various API calls and were originally an external library managed by the author. They were added to the standard includes some time ago as they were proving such a useful addition to general AutoIt programming.

If you were to produce some nice API/DLL call wrapper functions then the place to put them is into the "Examples" section where they can be peer-reviewed by the community. If they are considered really useful then they may be taken into the standard includes, but as that means that the small number of people who manage this ever-expanding package have to take over the task of integrating all the various functions with any new version of the AutoIt core or Windows release this does not happen that often.

M23