The cause of the slowdown is the lack of name cache in Environment. 
Class, global and trait names were cached in SystemDictionary, so asking 
for #classAndTraitNames was cheap.
If you try it with a 4.4 image (or any image which doesn't use 
Enviroments), then you'll find that it's it about 15 times faster there, 
which is probably sufficient on a slower machines.

Starting with an empty list might make the UI more responsive, but as soon 
as you start typing, it will be just as slow as before.


Levente

On Fri, 24 May 2013, tim Rowledge wrote:

> While I'm thinking of UI stuff, here's a suggestion that might be simple for a Morphite to try out -
> For the class category and message protocol lists, add a 'spotlight' morph. The class category 'find class' menu entry work ok on a fast machine but is very slow on smaller machines at least in part because of building a large list and a full window in which to show them. If the top of the browser list were to be a typeable morph attached to a very lightweight drop-down list (a menu in essence) of matches for what was typed… so instead of doing
>
> menu or cmd-f,
> opening a somewhat complicated dialogue/window showing all classes,
> typing the pattern,
> selecting a matching one
>
> we might have -
>
> type into pattern field
> fast, simple list displayed containing only matching entries
> select choice
>
> I'm thinking of this as both a lighter weight bit of work for the system (since the full list of all classes need not be built and formatted and displayed) and a slightly lower friction UI for the user (since the UI is right there in front of you). The same widget targeted at all messages of a class could be nice. I wonder if it might be even more effective if nothing were displayed until at least 'n' characters were entered, where 'n' is probably 2-4. Is it actually useful to see  a list of all classes containing a single typed letter? Could we sensibly link the pattern to regexp code, or at least basic matching with wildcards?
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: WDS: Warp Drive, Scotty!
>
>
>
>