It is unfortunate that you had a bad experience with Rev in the past.
I have been developing in Rev since 2001, and have written 7 shipping apps during that timeframe.
Of the roughly 1600 commands in the language, almost all of them call upon tightly written, compiled C code in the engine itself.
I write database migration software which has to process the data and the GUI for a variety of databases, including FileMaker Pro. I actually parse and reformat data on the fly on a record by record basis - and I have never had a performance issue. Even when processing hundreds of megabytes of data, my application has shown excellent performance.
I suggest that the reason Rev's consulting business also uses other languages in addition to Rev is:
1) They use the appropriate language for each task which they have to perform.
Revtalk code is not always going to be the best solution to every problem. With Rev, you can write plug-ins in C to gain additional Operating System functionality (i.e. MacOSX CoreImage features) or performance. This is how the revDB features are implemented in Rev itself.
2) The customer may have required a specific development language for the project. So, being responsive to their customer's requests, they may have used a Rev app as a wrapper around some other language, or they may have written the entire project in the requested language. Either way, they met the customer's needs, and generated revenue to support further development of the IDE. It is an everyone wins type of situation.
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It is unfortunate that you had a bad experience with Rev in the past. I have been developing in Rev since 2001, and have written 7 shipping apps during that timeframe. Of the roughly 1600 commands in the language, almost all of them call upon tightly written, compiled C code in the engine itself. I write database migration software which has to process the data and the GUI for a variety of databases, including FileMaker Pro. I actually parse and reformat data on the fly on a record by record basis - and I have never had a performance issue. Even when processing hundreds of megabytes of data, my application has shown excellent performance.
I suggest that the reason Rev's consulting business also uses other languages in addition to Rev is: 1) They use the appropriate language for each task which they have to perform. Revtalk code is not always going to be the best solution to every problem. With Rev, you can write plug-ins in C to gain additional Operating System functionality (i.e. MacOSX CoreImage features) or performance. This is how the revDB features are implemented in Rev itself. 2) The customer may have required a specific development language for the project. So, being responsive to their customer's requests, they may have used a Rev app as a wrapper around some other language, or they may have written the entire project in the requested language. Either way, they met the customer's needs, and generated revenue to support further development of the IDE. It is an everyone wins type of situation.