[musicale]

> It's performant

So you are saying some part of the (language, compiler, runtime, generated code, etc.) is... what, exactly?

Perhaps one or more of: {Memory-,CPU-,Power-}efficient? Fast? Compact? Reliable/non-buggy? Easy to use? Expressive? Easy to understand, maintain or port? Standards-compliant? Or maybe that it contains a useful and complete API for a certain application domain (e.g. games/sound/animation on the Spectrum Next?) Or maybe it has a nice IDE or workflow? All/some of the above?

And ... compared to what? Other BASIC compilers for ZX or for CP/M? Other CP/M languages/IDEs like Turbo Pascal (which sounds like it was a pretty great environment according to folks on HN at least?)

[breakintoprog]

Performant as a measure of speed against rival BASIC interpreters.

BBC Basic is recognised as being one of the fastest floating point BASIC interpreters written for 8-bit CPUs. This was partly down to how the language was coded (in 6502 originally), and certain aspects of the BBC Micro's architecture. Although the BBC Micro's CPU was only running at 2Mhz, it had fast RAM chips with little to no contention, despite sharing memory with the video system.

These benchmarks give some indication of relative speeds to its contemporaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugg/Feldman_benchmarks

I've run those benchmarks on the Z80 version. It is faster than the native BASIC of the Spectrum (Sinclair BASIC) running at the same CPU speed (3.5Mhz).

https://github.com/breakintoprogram/next-bbc-basic/blob/main...

[rwmj]

BBC BASIC was noted at the time for being much faster than the BASICs on similar machines of the era. I believe this was a mix of the BASIC itself being simply better, the hardware being a bit faster, and tricks like inline asm being possible. There were even action games written in BBC BASIC.