A new update is going out today for Clarion 8.  This is a pretty significant release in that it has some important speed improvements for drawing complex windows. For this release we worked closely with a couple dozen Clarion devs testing their real-world windows using internal builds.  This was a win-win situation for all of us — we received immediate feedback as we released iterative changes to the RTL, and the developers who participated were able to test their biggest and baddest windows with the new RTL.

In a previous post I wrote about the changes we made for flicker suppression, but that’s only part of the story.  In addition we spent a lot of cycles working on improving the speed of opening and repainting complex windows, the elimination of extra sets of caption buttons being drawn by the OS into the App Frame, and a number of other MDI related issues.  The bottom line is that you’ll see a nice improvement in your Apps perceived performance, with just a recompile and no other changes (and its an improvement that your end users will surely notice).  The improvements to the RTL actually came from retro-fitting code being developed for Clarion 9 back into the C8 codebase.

Speed and flicker control aren’t the only items addressed in this release. There are also fixes and changes across the board from the IDE itself, template changes, drivers and more.