On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 09:21:52 +0100, stéphane ducasse  
<ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:

> with traits there is no performance penalty.

Heh. I don't think Tim was meaning that.

It is bad that Morphic has visible delays.

I recall calculating for my first computer (TRS-80 Model I) how much load  
it had by making every CPU cycle a second to bring the thing up to human  
scale (I envisioned a little guy in the machine who could do something  
every second).

So, in 1 second 1 million cycles (was it a 1MHz Z80? Don't recall), to a  
human scale that's 1 million seconds to do something - 12 days, correct? A  
typist with 120 keys per minute, 2 per second, would fire off an  
astonishing 1 keystroke every 6 days to the little guy. In this time, the  
little guy had to interpret the keystroke, move it to memory, the screen  
buffer, and maybe move some bits around to make some space.

Needless to say, the TRS-80 word processor had no trouble at all keeping  
up with my typing.

So when some 2.5 decades later I have a machine that is THREETHOUSAND  
TWOHUNDRED times as fast, and I see visible delays and sluggishness in  
simple user interface elements, something is horribly, terribly wrong.

I do hope, btw, that as a side effect of the Morphic split, we will be  
able to get back some performance. Original Morphic must have been faster  
than what's there now, not?