Is Bricscad Lisp Faster Than AutoCAD Lisp?

Bangalore, India

GeoTools is a predominantly Lisp-based application and is available both on the AutoCAD as well as Bricscad platforms. Today, I ran a couple of bench-marking tests in GeoTools using the same environment settings in both AutoCAD and Bricscad. Here are the results for you to see. You can run the same tests in GeoTools (even with the 30-day evaluation version) as well using the supplied drawings or with your own, and let me know what you find.

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Test # 1:

Command:  GT_TRIANGULATE

Menu:  GeoTools -> Civil Tools -> Create TIN (Delauney triangulation)

DWG used: TIN_Points.DWG

Task Description: Create a TIN model from 1095 points, using Delauney triangulation (pure mathematical number crunching) and creating 3dface objects in CAD as output (DWG database interaction).

Time taken:

AutoCAD : 570.62 seconds
Bricscad: 116.75 seconds

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Test # 2:

Command: GT_IDXYZ

Menu: GeoTools -> Annotations -> Label Points

DWG used: TIN_Points.DWG

Task Description: Create Z elevation text lables around 1095 points. Build a selection of all points, create Z elevation text string, and create text objects representing the elevation.

Time taken:

AutoCAD:  16.19 seconds
Bricscad: 8.12 seconds

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Test # 3:

Command: GT_DRAPEPOLY

Menu: GeoTools -> Build -> Drape a polyline across a set of intersecting linear objects

DWG Used: TIN_Points.DWG

Task Description: Drape a 3d polyline across a TIN model, so that it interpolates and acquires elevations from intersecting 3dpolyline objects that lie along its path. This operation performs various curve intersection functions, sort and manage selection sets, intersection distances etc, that lie along the path.

Time taken:

AutoCAD:  12.07 seconds
Bricscad: 16.17 seconds

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Test # 4:

Command: GT_SORTEDPOLY

Menu: GeoTools -> Draw -> Draw a polyline by joining points in sorted order

DWG Used: Blocks&Xdata.DWG

Task Description: Sort a given set of points in a specified order. In this case, perform list sort on 1420 points in ascending X direction. Gather the selection of points, extract the X coordinate, list sort it, build the new order of sorted points and join them with a polyline.

Time taken:

AutoCAD  : 388.24 seconds
Bricscad : 45.4 seconds

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Test # 5:

Command: GT_REM_XD

Menu: GeoTools -> Extended Entity Data -> Remove Xdata

DWG Used: Blocks&Xdata.DWG

Task: Remove extended entity data from 1420 objects.

Time taken:

AutoCAD  : 8.02 seconds
Bricscad : 7.77 seconds

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Test # 6:

Command: GT_ATT2XD

Menu: GeoTools -> Conversion -> Attributes to Xdata

DWG Used: Blocks&Xdata.DWG

Task Description: Read all attributes from 1420 blocks, convert them into extended entity data records.

Time taken:

AutoCAD  : 12.95 seconds
Bricscad : 20.97 seconds

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Test # 7:

Command: GT_PL_INTER

Menu: GeoTools -> Polyline ToolSet1 -> Assign interpolated Z values to vertices

DWG Used: Road_Route_Polyline_For_PL_InterP.dwg

Task Description: Interpolate all non-zero polyline vertices with linearly interpolated values and populate the 3d polyline containing 3642 vertices with values.

Time taken:

AutoCAD  : 50.85 seconds
Bricscad : 46.01 seconds

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So, back to the question - Is Bricscad Lisp Faster Than AutoCAD Lisp?

As you can see from the results, Bricscad Lisp is atleast 4-6 times faster than AutoCAD Lisp when it comes to plain number crunching (creating a TIN, performing sort operations, interpolation computations etc) but when it comes to DWG interaction, creating drawing objects, reading entity data etc, Bricscad Lisp performance is almost the same as AutoCAD Lisp, maybe 10-15% faster in some cases.

In two of the tests above (#3 and #6), AutoCAD Lisp in fact, turned in faster than Bricscad Lisp. I will keep performing some more tests to see if I can come up with a more specific detail of which kind of operations work faster or slower in Bricscad or AutoCAD. Until then, your feedback and experiences are welcome.

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Comments

[Daniel]

It's my been experience that Bricscad's lisp engine is faster as well, The SQLite for lisp engine I wrote is ~15% faster in Bricscad.

[mahmoud]

thank you so much and hope good progress for you.