Andreas,

thank you for your explanations.  Being away from the list for a couple of 
weeks, I probably expected too much from the event stuff than currently is 
implemented.  At least, no clicks are lost anymore.

I know very well, that omitting polling is difficult - especially if it has 
to be done in an platform independent way, but that's still not a real 
excuse ;-)

I'm glad that something happened to squeak but if it doesn't mutate into 
something that will not eat up CPU resources when being idle, I 
unfortunately cannot use it for server applications as I really would have 
liked.  (A Java VM has this feature, so I know it can be done.)


>Since almost all VMs currently use a single thread for running both,
>interpret() and the event processing loop, we have to be OUT OF 
>INTERPRET() in order to receive an event.

So we should use two threads.  I thought, the event semaphore was 
introduced for exactly that reason.

>Understood so far?!

No problem.  Keep going :-)

> > And what's about sockets or serial port?  Are they still
> > polled or will they also use events?
>
>They're still polled. The key issue in the VM event stuff was not loose 
>user input events anymore.

I see.  Actually I think it's also important that sockets signal 
events.  When using Swiki I noticed that there was a noticable difference 
in the response time whether my mouse was inside the Squeak window or not.

I think, when I didn't provide input events to the VM, the VM tried to be 
nice to the system and went into delay mode.  This unfortunately also means 
that sockets are polled less often and so the response time of the swiki 
goes up.

However, it's absolutely no way to simply go into "fast" mode and let 
Squeak burn all processor cycles, never going to sleep.  Squeak already 
need too many processing power for a server which is used cooperatively 
when doing delays.

Again, Java has the better features here and I really hate that!  I'd like 
to promote Squeak as an application server but this is impossible right now.


bye
--
My eyes adapted to the darkness... finally I can see clearly now