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The fast way of controlling the Scintilla Edit Control is to call message handling function by yourself.

You can retrieve a pointer to the message handling function of the Scintilla Edit Control and call it directly to execute a command.

This way is much more faster than the SendMessage() way.

int (*fn)(void*,int,int,int);
void * ptr;
int canundo;

fn = (int (__cdecl *)(void *,int,int,int))SendMessage(
    hwndScintilla,SCI_GETDIRECTFUNCTION,0,0);
ptr = (void *)SendMessage(hwndScintilla,SCI_GETDIRECTPOINTER,0,0);

canundo = fn(ptr,SCI_CANUNDO,0,0);

• PB5.31; ScintillaGadget; direct access to functions;

• Is this approach “much more faster” also in PureBasic?
• Or PB’s ScintillaSendMessage() is already providing the faster interface to Scintilla component?

Tristano wrote:... considering how slow a complex Lexer might be in comparison, if has lots of nested check with RegEx....

Tenaja wrote:RegEx is handy when you will be searching for "random" patterns within "random" strings, but with most Scintilla applications, you will be looking for specific strings.

On Windows, the message-passing scheme used to communicate between the container and Scintilla is mediated by the operating system SendMessage function and can lead to bad performance when calling intensively. To avoid this overhead, Scintilla provides messages that allow you to call the Scintilla message function directly.

While faster, this direct calling will cause problems if performed from a different thread to the native thread of the Scintilla window in which case SendMessage(hSciWnd, SCI_*, wParam, lParam) should be used to synchronize with the window's thread.

This feature also works on GTK+ but has no significant impact on speed.

From version 1.47 on Windows, Scintilla exports a function called Scintilla_DirectFunction that can be used the same as the function returned by SCI_GETDIRECTFUNCTION. This saves you the call to SCI_GETDIRECTFUNCTION and the need to call Scintilla indirectly via the function pointer.

• Uses the direct access functions provided by Scintilla to improve performance. Multi threaded code can still use SendMessage by calling the method SetCallDirect with a FALSE parameter value.