Forum Post: RE: What have you done with the GUID function?

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh]

While admitted the change is dramatic, I'm not sure it really matters. We are talking about 0.00005 seconds to create one. Any time one is creating a GUID, there is some work associated with it ... not infrequently a DB update or maybe passing something to the UI. Are you going to notice 0.00005 seconds in the midst of that? There are a bunch of things in ABL which, if one runs similar benchmarks to compare to other languages, look very slow. In many cases, that slowness is understandable because it is being executed by a virtual machine and the nature of ABL means a lot of interpretive overhead compared to the time needed to do the actual function. But, much, perhaps most, of the time this is irrelevant because one is not executing the function in tight million iteration loops, but rather it is a small piece of some set of operations which take much more time than that one little piece. In many cases, like the present, the actual time is negligible and only looks bad compared to other languages focusing on the tight loop. Which is more important? Creating 1 million GUIDs in a fraction of a second or making sure that there are no duplicates?

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