Morphic, Dynapad, and Squeak performance

reic0024 at d.umn.edu reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Fri May 24 18:37:29 UTC 2002


Tommy Thorn <tt1729 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 1. the use of something like Morphic as opposed 
>    to, say, MVC, is critical for enabling small
>    apps to be designed on the road

Morphic can be a little easier to write for than MVC, which can cause
this effect of which you speak.  However, if I did choose to move
Dynapad "officially" to MVC, it would only be temporary- a new widget
set would be created.  Something on top of MVC or BitBlt, I cannot say. 
But if I did go down this road, it would be a long time until anything
useful was born out of it, so it's likely not going to be the direction
for anything other than the back-burner.

> 2. the portability of Squeak is outstanding. In
>    all likelyhood you/we would move Dynapad with
>    out as you upgrade your PDA to the next 
>    (necessary more powerful) unit.  The choice
>    between MVC and Morphic will almost certainly 
>    look different at that time and I believe
>    that designing for the present might hurt
>    in the future.

See above.  An extended MVC/new widget set would have three main goals:

1. Have adequate performance on a PDA: I use a 206 MHz SA device, but I
can only hope that it'd work OK on something slower- 100 MHz perhaps.
2. Be straightforward to program for: Probably a level up on the
abstraction food-chain, but I'm interested in something for creating UIs
programatically that's as simple as Tk.  I'm working on this for Morphic
as well, but it would exist for MVC+ if I choose that route.
3. Have the widgets that make sense on a PDA, and have the ability to
create new ones and compose existing ones into a new widget.  

All this, but the first, is pretty easily achievable in Morphic on
Squeak 3.0. 

> 3. [...]
>    I stand in awe at how well designed Squeak is
>    and how works, but never the less, it seems 
>    to me that the performance could be improved
>    quite a lot if it had to.  

Well, please do have a whack at it.  I, and many others, would love to
see what you come up with.  

> On embedded devices we need better performance
> for Morphic to be usable.

And one solution to that problem is moving to an older version of
Squeak, and still using Morphic.  I'm creating 2.6 and 2.8 images with
the same setup as the Dynapad R0.01 image, to see what performance is
like.  CharRecog is a lot faster in 2.6 with the usual text morphs than
it is in 3.0- almost as fast as it is in MVC.  

On VM optimization and native code generation: it's not my thing.  I'm a
biologist (or will be someday :P ), and have little interest and even
less ability in such things.  Naturally, I'd love the end-result, but
I've no knowledge in the area.  If you have the time, please look into
it, again, many would be greatful.  Very greatful, I'm sure.

> I'm convinced that it's technically feasible
> to make Squeak on StrongArm fast enough to make
> Morphic usable.  I'm just not sure if we have
> enough collective spare cycles to make it happen.

Indeed, I don't doubt that it's possible.  However, I'm interested in
getting a system that works, something that I can carry around with me
and take notes in a way that suits me.  For the time being, I think
using an older version of Squeak (with Morphic, mind you!) may be the
best way to achieve that.

Regards,
Aaron



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