Lex Spoon wrote:

> Regarding morphic performance, someone should really sit down and find
> some comparable operations between Morphic and MVC, and try to find some
> hard data about what exactly is slower.  They might things like popping up the
> world menu, selecting an item in a list morph, scrolling around, etc.
> Then, we can actually look at a profiler and see what's happening....

I'd say Morphic is to MVC like Smalltalk to C, or perhaps rather GC to
manually managed memory: Morphic automatically ties all the little knots
that you have to manage by hand in MVC, connecting the various parts with
messages, managing the nested hierarchy of elements, and so on. It also
automatically handles double buffering, for example. All this automatic
convenient stuff incurs a small, general speed penalty, which is rather
thinly spread all over. Just like with GC, if that analogy wasn't obvious.
Hence, there is probably no silver bullet lurking in there.

But as usual, the general wisdom is that especially as machines get ever
faster, we are willing to pay such a small price for the great convenience.
But also as usual, those who are accustomed to the good old-fashioned way
may never see a reason to switch, since they're happy with what they
have--just compare with the C and GC cases.

I think the greatest performance gains may come when we understand how to
use Morphic as Morphic; what we have today it is much like MVC stuff redone
in a new way. This is in fact literally the case with all the browsers and
things.

Henrik