Hello,

Typically for a new contribution, one write a new task in the bugtracker and then fix it (here:��https://pharo.fogbugz.com/).

The 2 issues I mentioned, Morphic and BitBlt performance are well-known issues in the Pharo team. Some projects have been started to solve these issues: a refactoring of Morphic and Athens. To what I understood, Athens is supposed to replace the bottom layer of Morphic, BitBlt should be replaced by Cairo (binded with NativeBoost) and the top layer of Morphic should be refactored.

A guy was hired to work on these projects, but he left after a month and the Pharo team lost over 65keuros. So the 2 projects got kind of delayed, we're sorry about it.

I think you should talk directly to the the persons responsible for these projects to know what to do to help. The Morphic refactoring is leaded by Stephane Ducasse (and/or Alain Plantec ?) and Athens is leaded by Igor Stasenko. They can tell you on what to do to improve the UI. I know that recently Igor was working on a new/cleaner/faster TextEditor. Stef and Alain have committed several changes to Morph during the past years.

I cannot tell you what to do on these projects because I am working on Smalltalk code execution speed improvement (Cog JIT performance) and I am not deeply aware of recent advancements on these specific projects. So please Ask Stef or Igor.

PS: I was reading again my previous mail, I realized that Athens relies on Cairo so it probably uses GPU accelerated GUI.

Cl��ment

2014-05-31 15:01 GMT+02:00 Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire.fernandes@gmail.com>:

Can we collect somewhere in the web the information you mentioned and
other more accurate? Ideally a wiki. Is there a dedicated place for
Pharo? The wiki bugtracker?
I guess most of us does not know where to look at for improvement.
Asking to a newbie to contribute does not really help if we can't
provide direction.

Hilaire

Le 31/05/2014 10:48, Cl��ment Bera a ��crit :

> One is that the Morphic-based UI is slow. You can see it by using the
> old MVC instead of Morphic which goes faster. Recently Morphic got
> slower on Pharo and it is now slower than in Squeak. It may be due to
> refactoring on Morphic in order to get it better, it may not be. I guess
> this is temporary.
>
> The second thing is that BitBlt is slow for 2 reasons: it is bit based
> and not vector based and its implementation half in the VM half in the
> image forces to copy a huge number of bits that could be avoided
>
> So the answer is that you need to contribute to the refactoring of
> Morphic or to Athens.
>

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