Hi Giuseppe -

[cc: Gary for input on some of the issues below]

Giuseppe Luigi Punzi Ruiz wrote:
> I started from 
> http://squeakvm.org/win32/release/Squeak-3.10.2-trunk.zip, Load Code 
> Updates.
> Then, I add the MC repository of Polymorph, and Load latest package of 
> Polymorph-Widgets, then latest from Polymorph-Squeak-Widgets
> 
> Title bar looks ugly, and If you open Preferences, click on Windows to 
> get a MNU (and others strange behaviour).

Let's start with the easy stuff. The issue of the ugly title bars are 
caused by an age-old issue of trying to create a bold version of a font 
that's already bold (and failing to do so in a visually pleasing way). 
You can work around this issue by changing the window title font to a 
non-bold font (or convincing Gary not to bolden the title font in the 
SoftSqueak theme ;-)

The preferences blow up has been fixed in the trunk, it resulted from 
the use of custom view registries in Polymorph (but was my fault for not 
properly supporting those).

However, even after fixing that I got some errors about 
BlockClosure>>isValid and BlockClosure>>asMinimalRepresentation. Looking 
around in the Polymorph repository I found these in 
Polymorph-EventEnhancements (but on BlockContext not on BlockClosure) 
with a number of other extension methods and classes none of which seem 
to be used by Polymorph-Widgets.

Question for Gary: Is it enough to implement these methods on 
BlockClosure and expect things to work without having to load 
Polymorph-EventEnhancements, or is some or all of EventEnhancements 
needed for Polymorph? If it's just the two methods I think we should put 
them into the trunk with comments and get over it.

The other package I looked at was Polymorph-Squeak-Widgets. There are 
only two methods here; one in BorderedMorph that looks like an obvious 
fix and should be added to the trunk. The other one 
(#handleDisabledKey:) is on ParagraphEditor and effectively a no-op 
since we are switching to the Cuis editors. Something will need to be 
added to TextEditor for this purpose.

Question for Gary: Should these be folded into Squeak proper or do you 
prefer to keep them in Polymorph? Either way is fine by me but you might 
have a preference.

Then there is the issue of overrides. Polymorph contains a lot of them 
which is understandable considering what it is doing but it means that 
the code will be very brittle with regards to any changes in Morphic.

Question for Gary: Do you think it would make sense to try to integrate 
these overrides so that we avoid these brittle dependencies or is this 
just going to create a maintenance nightmare for you (i.e., having 
versions with and without overrides)?

Lastly, performance. The image felt slow after loading Polymorph which I 
attributed at first to the pretty gradients but when I switched to the 
"StandardSqueak" theme (which is indistinguishable from the trunk's 
current look) it still felt slow. So I ran a version of the "standard" 
browser benchmark:

| saveMorphs time |
[saveMorphs := World submorphs.
  World removeAllMorphs."heh, heh"
  time := [1 to: 10 do: [:i |
	MorphicToolBuilder new open:
           (Browser new setClass: SystemDictionary selector: nil).
	World doOneCycleNow].
	World submorphs do: [:m | m delete. World doOneCycleNow].
   ] timeToRun] ensure:[World addAllMorphs: saveMorphs].

I found that in the current trunk image the benchmark completes in less 
than half the time (!) that it takes to run it in the same image with 
Polymorph loaded (10401 msecs vs. 23297 msecs). Something is slowing 
down with Polymorph and very much so.

Question for Gary: Is there any intrinsic reason why the Polymorph image 
would be so much slower? Have you done any serious performance analysis 
and any insights what might be slowing it down? The benchmark was run 
with all animations turned off yaddaya to get as close as possible to 
the default Squeak look. I actually think that the above benchmark is a 
smoking gun that you can increase performance of Polymorph by 2x if you 
can find out what is slowing you down.

All said and done the situation is this: Once you update from the trunk 
you need to implement two methods on BlockClosure, that is 
BlockClosure>>isValid (returns true) and 
BlockClosure>>asMinimalRepresentation (returns self). Once this is done, 
load Polymorph-Widgets and Polymorph will work. There is the outstanding 
issue of ParagraphEditor but it won't cause any immediate harm and I'd 
like to hear back from Gary before deciding on how to fix these issues.

Cheers,
   - Andreas