>(you can stop laughing at my rant now)

Actually you are both right, in your own ways. In comparable conditions, sure VFP will be 25% because it does tree times more work. But there are no comparable conditions... because the current speed of FPW is zero, it won't run on 64 bit.

Okay, here's a comparable thing. Same code running over the years: my solitaire game. Apart from some minor cosmetic issues, the code is mostly the same as it was in 2003. Shortened it by a third when adding jQuery in 2008, which actually made it slower, but looked better.

And guess what, it's now blazingly fast. I can't even notice when it reshuffled the cards and laid them down again. And back then I could just about see when that happened, or when it had to do a double loop to check whether the game was over after the last move. Even on my clumsy Pine64 phone...