Who is faster?

This was a question asked by many a developers when I first introduced into the little island paradise of beer drinkers that there existed other worlds and frameworks, it was a shock to many, how could there be other alternatives, just like we have been through the various ages in terms of our beliefs and values, from believing that the earth was flat and we would fall off the edge of the world and not having a zero till the Indians gave that missing piece to the world (strangely it's called the Arabic number system). So the question was is there any other framework that is better in any ways than the beer framework?

For those that do not know what the beer framework is, Corona is a very famous brand of Mexican beer, so I hope you now know what the beer framework is.

I have worked with quite a few programming languages probably when many a beer followers would not even have been born. So everytime there is a new Radical amazing language, that will change things, I am skeptical. I recollect around the early 90's there was an app (pre-cursor to Authorware, that allowed for creating apps by drawing the logic)even Authorware is no longer here, though many want the functionality of the same. Director was much better in terms of how it worked, it was killed just a Flash was too. So, would a new framework really withstand and prove to be any good?

There were two frameworks, Gideros and Moai, that came as contenders, I have yet not got my hands dirty with Moai, I have been having a look under the bonnet for Gideros, with the functionality to add Plug-ins, a similar language to Flash's ActionScript and scripting via Lua, it is an easy migration path for those that are either from a Flash background or have tried their hand on the beer framework.

The question still remains, is this any good, now having some form of API that is similar to another language does not give it any merit points, it is in the end the two main factors, is it easy to use and does it have any significant advantage as it is not easy to move to a new framework every now and then.

I will be honest that I have not as yet conducted a comprehensive test on feature by feature, but these are enough to tell me that Gideros is come of age and is serious competition to Corona.

Features
1. Ability to extend the framework via plug-ins to provide functionality that is currently missing
2. Instant deployment to a device for testing, be it an iOS or an Android device. I have tried this with an iPhone, iPad and a Kindle Fire, it is as easy as pressing play in the IDE and the app runs on your device even if you are connected on the WiFi. No more cable syncs.
3. The speed is amazing, not amazing but blazingly fast...

The basis of this statement is the test of this Elasticity demo, or a invisible rope demo that I had created earlier
The Corona Version is


The Gideros Version is


You can see for yourself which is more responsive, both are running on their respective simulators on the same iMac. In fact there is a speed_scale that determines how fast the ball returns back to the circle, so a larger number would mean that it would be faster, where as a smalled number would mean that it will take that much more time to return. I had to reduce the scle from 0.5 to 0.1 in the Gideros version to be able to record the ball moving on the screen it returned very fast with a setting of 0.5 which was used in the Corona demo.

Again, let this be no bearing on which is better, if you ask me which is better a Mac or Windows? I use both but I mainly use Macs recently. I do not buy Windows Boxes anymore even if I need to run windows Software, I would rather buy Apple hardware as it is value for money and peace of mind. So you have to make your decision on this as to which one do you want to work with. In terms of speed, I can safely say that definitely, Gideros is much better in graphics performance than CoronaSDK.