I haven't seen it reported, so I will. Morphic is still to slow to be useable on my Centris 610 20mhz 6840RC40. I am still limping along trying to learn how to use the old fashioned MVC.
Yep, we know. That's partly why we left MVC in. The scrolling lists in Morphic (out of which most of the tools are made) still need some tuning, but it even when that is done, Morphic may still seem sluggish on 68K Macs. There are two reasons for this: (a) Morphic provides smoother screen updates than MVC via double-buffering, and (b) Morphic shows you the full object rather than just an outline as you resize or drag it. I wouldn't want to give up (a), but it might be relatively easy to make (b) be an option that could be turned off on slower machines.
And there's always hope that some super-Jitter VM will give us the extra performance we need to run Morphic well on slower machines. :->
I am looking forward to trying the new pluggable MVC. The differences between dialects is still frustrating. The debugger is my friend, and I am slowly learning new tricks.
Which dialects do you mean? Squeak 2.0 versus Squeak 1.31 or Squeak versus some other Smalltalk? Just curious.
Thanks for your performance report. Here's an interesting Morphic benchmark you could try:
1. make an empty Morphic world or project 2. use "new morph" to make a "BouncingAtomsMorph" and a "FrameRateMorph"; delete all other morphs 3. read off the frame rate and milliseconds/frame
On a Mac 8100/110, I get about 74-78 msecs/frame (12-13 frames/sec). I tried this on a Powerbook G3 in a computer store and got something like 50 frames/sec!
-- John