OFF Topics :: PC-laptop or Powerbook

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Thu Oct 6 01:07:23 UTC 2005


On 5-Oct-05, at 3:16 PM, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:

> I'm using an IBM R40 (Pentium M 1.4Ghz) with Debian and Squeak.  
> Squeak seems to run pretty fast subjectively - when I've worked  
> with people using Macs, it seems that some things (redraw while  
> debugging, in particular), are happening much, much slower there  
> than on my machine.

This issue I *think* has been mostly fixed.

a) There was a issue with Morphic loosing track of how pixel flushing  
would happen, resulting in a drawing flush event every pixel.
b) OS-X 10.4 enforces a rule of say 50 *ish* flushes per second, if  
drawing requires 10,000 flushes then you notice this rule and the  
impact of (a)
c) Going from an application byte array thru the window server to the  
graphics hardware and not using Open/GL etc is painfully slow on OS-X.

so

a) There was a fix to the Squeak Morphic Debugging code to ensure  
Morphic doesn't get confused.
b) I had altered the Squeak Mac Carbon VM to consolidate flush events  
to currently 50 times or less per second.
c) I moved to Quartz, versus QuickDraw. In the usual drawing cases  
this has made things faster.
d) Quartz extreme is slower (see 10.5, or 10.4.4? I'd guess), but I'm  
working with an engineer at Apple on this problem.

I will note the Squeak Mac Unix based VM does a flush every time  
Squeak asks to draw to the window, so pixel animation might be slower.

--
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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