Jason,

My experience is that home-grown widgets can indeed outperform the
native variety under some situations.  I would argue that it is not so
much that bitblt is fast (the native guys have access to it too), but
that when emulating, one can bypass some algorithmic inefficiencies in
message-driven GUIs.  IMHO, emulation is most likely to be of benefit
when building a composite widget with a large number of sub-widgets. 
Doing it all with native widgets means that each sub-widget gets its own
message queue, and one must shoe-horn interactions into it.  When
emulating, only the top-level widget needs an OS-level queue, and the
hordes of sub-widgets are accessible directly vs. by individual queues
and their associated context switches.

That is not to say that native widgets are bad, only that one can have
too much of a good thing.  I would very much like to see Squeak grow the
ability to use them.  On one level, I like Squeak's single main window,
but it does interfere with some types of work that I do on Windows with
Dolphin.  Perhaps the ideal thing would be to have an option not to use
it, and there have been efforts in that direction (I do not recall the
details or status).

Squeak's need for native widgets is greatest in terms of the feel of the
GUI.  Halos and "the hand" are great prototyping/editing concepts, but
they are no substitute for a consistent presentation.  Not everything in
modern GUIs is bad<g>.  I am not alone in looking for ways to break
dependencies on Microsoft, and I think Squeak could benefit from
substantial projects seeking a new home.

For those who say "don't break our toy," I note that one can still do
all kinds of incredible bleeding-edge stuff on top of a clean
foundation.  I urge you to stop thinking of Squeak as a toy, and start
thinking of how to make a tool that can build toys (a worthy goal) as
well as boring stuff has market and research value.

Bill




======================
J J <azreal1977 at ...> wrote:

This message sounds like Ffenestri is the planned future GUI interface
of Squeak.  Is that so, or I read it wrong?  I was under the impression
that the BltBlt method was faster then using native windows (though it
could be that just the wxWidget libraries are themselves slow).  Is this
true?  Sig has mentioned he can get a 3 to 5 times speed up from BltBlt
using OpenGL.

Note, I'm not expressing an opinion here, just trying to understand.

Thanks,
Jason

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

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