slate gui slowness needs fixing before proceeding

[Tony Garnock-Jones]

Timmy Douglas wrote:
> processed by the ui fairly quickly (1 sec between typed characters
> showing up) compared to the delay before the events registered (like
> 2-10 sec after the first keypress). But if you try inspector.slate and
> try to drag the inspector windows you will go crazy. I guess mouse
> motion events really drag it down or something along those lines.

It sounds like there's something rotten in the interface to SDL, rather
than basic slowness of Slate... well, I'd be surprised if it was Slate
since I've always been pleasantly surprised at the speed of the system
in general. Perhaps there's something sub-par in the polling logic?

I can't say for sure, of course, since I've been concentrating on other
aspects of the system and haven't tried the SDL interfaces for a long,
long time!

> Well I'm pretty new to this stuff so I don't really know what would
> get cached and flushed... I went to the library today since I saw you
> thought ACD&I(?) was a good book (on some irc conversation a while
> back) but they only let me check it out for 2 hours in-library... I
> gave up after 30 min since there wasn't much I could do there.

Try the Self papers:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/chambers92design.html
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/chambers91making.html
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/hlzle94adaptive.html
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/chambers90iterative.html

They changed my life ;-)

> Well, if he takes the powerpc asm route, I hope there is a way that I
> could run it on this old athlon box.

One important aspect of a direct-threaded design, ISTM, is the
instruction encodings... if someone can design a fixed-width "VLIW"
format for direct-threaded bytecodes, then the same architecture ought
to be able to apply to x86 as well as PPC.

Tony