Matt,

I suspect the author is heavily biased toward native widgets. Note the assumption that they will out-perform emulated widgets. All it takes to turn that around is a good VM, careful coding on the emulation layer, and a carelessly written native widget library and/or one heavy on eye candy. Depending on the design of the native platform, emulated widgets can shortcut cumbersome uses of a message queue to gain a design advantage. It is not at all clear that native widgets will always win on speed, especially on "older" hardware.

That said, I have no objection to making native widgets available. If for no other reason, some native widget discipline might be good for Squeak, and there are times when it would be nice to have one native window per system window - and other times when that would be wasteful.

Since we already have emulated widgets, "all" we need to do is keep them alive while enhancing native widget support. I believe that should be our goal. With MVP, switching between them probably should be as simple as changing the view hierarchy to be used.

Bill

Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bschwab@anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029

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tapplek@gmail.com 11/29/07 3:21 PM >>>

I found this FAQ entry for Eclipse very interesting: http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Why_does_Eclipse_use_SWT%3F

It discusses the merits of both native and portable widgets, and why eclipse chose the native SWT rather than the portable Swing.

This may be obvious flamebait, but it could also be interesting. First person to reply is banned from planet Jupiter ;).