Eddie Cottongim wrote:
> A lot of the 3.6-3.7 delta is due to primitives broken or disused during 
> the i8n effort. These include basic font printing and text layout. (Try 
> editing a big paragraph in a workspace, its not pleasant) These issues 
> have been reported and hopefully will be improved for 3.9.

These changes are not in 3.7 but only in 3.8 so speed differences 
between 3.6 and 3.7 are definitely not because of m17n changes.

> As for other ideas for speeding things up, there is about a 10% 
> improvement possible by caching gradients. I haven't quite got it 
> packaged up yet. The deal is, all those small 16 pixel  icons with 
> gradients each require a 512 element color array be generated, and most 
> of them can be shared. i figured it would be easier to cache gradients 
> rather than try to fix all the clients to share them manually. All those 
> duplicated color maps also use a fair amount of space.

An easier way to fix this issue might be to create smaller ramps - those 
512s are worst case for (essentially) fullscreen gradients and Balloon 
can deal with any power of two here. I don't remember exactly how I did 
this in Morphic but in Tweak the size of the gradient is bounded by the 
size of the object to draw (see CGradientFill>>updateFrame: and its 
senders).

Cheers,
   - Andreqas