I'm not sure what the delay in accessing an exported function is, but as far as execution speed goes, running a function will be much faster if written in, say, C++, rather than in DM. The reason for this is simply that your operating system can execute the code in the DLL directly, whereas for a DM function it has to execute the code from the BYOND software which then reads the bytecode from the DMB and acts on that.

If there is little-to-no latency in calling an exported DLL function via call(), you can expect DLL functions to execute significantly faster than a DM-written counterpart. Nadrew, for example, said that his str_replace() function written in C++ was significantly faster than the dd_replaceText() (or whatever it was; I don't know the library or the function name exactly).

Hiead