And there is also the matter of hardware evolution.

When I was running Pharo on my 2007 imac 20'' with dual core 2.GHZ , Morphic was slow. And by slow I mean that I could see it was struggling to move windows around. I could see windows flickering trying to render themselves moving around.

But now with my 2014 imac even though the screen is double the size and the resolution much bigger (27'' retina) , Morphic is now quite fast. The reason is of course the fact that the CPU is a quad core at 3 Ghz thats almost a 3x times increase in speed and it really shows.

Even when Pharo take full the huge area of 27'' Morphic is responsive and quite fast.��

8 cores are not much further down the road either. And unlike the native GUI of MACOS , Morphic does not take advantage of GPU acceleration that can offer speed us even 10 times compared to a modern CPU.��

So I think that even if we keep performance in Pharo at same level, things will get noticeably better through the evolution of hardware alone.��

I do agree that Efficiency and especially ease of use must be the main focus.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:

> On 05 Feb 2015, at 10:46, Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> 2015-02-05 10:12 GMT+01:00 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr>:
>
> > On 05 Feb 2015, at 10:04, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On 04 Feb 2015, at 22:04, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:
> >>
> >> A single parser is a nice goal, but performance is top priority for Shout, because it should do it's job real-time. When it starts lagging behind, then people just turn it off, because it doesn't help them.
> >> Can those parsers (SHRBTextStyler and a Smalltalk parser written using PetitParser) parse an average method in less than 20ms on an average machine?
> >
> > I have not yet benchmarked it�� PetitParser as it is is too slow, but we will soon have a faster version (factor 10).
> >
> > We should do some benchmarks. For using, it seems ok. With a fast machine + JIT, which does not say much of course.
> > (there is a setting 'AST based coloring�� in Pharo3 and Pharo4, but it is turned off by default).
> >
> > One thing that is nice with the AST is that it can be used for other things, too. e.g. in Pharo we have a menu that is defined
> > by the AST nodes and structural navigation in the editor.
> >
>
> Another way to see it: How would the original Smalltalk be designed if they would have had 4GB RAM in 1978?
>
> Badly for today's machines :)
>
>
> What fascinates me still is that Smalltalk used the existing resources (even building their own machines) to an
> extreme, while today we are obsessed to find reasons why we can not do anything that makes the system
> slower or use more memory than yesterday. And that even with resources growing every year��
>
> You're spoiled by your nice and expensive macbooks :)
>
> Honestly, on some of today's machines, you'd better avoid long methods or GT tools stuff because they are slow.
>
> SmaCC code generation is slow.
>
> PluggableTreeMorph is slow.
>
> Nautilus is slow.
>
> Loading large configurations is slow.
>
> Roassal complex graphs are slow.
>
> Serge's modeling stuff is slow.
>
> PetitParser has performance problems.
>
> BitBlt is slow (and Cairo has bugs).
>
>
> This is why we e.g. now have a meta object describing every instance variable in Pharo. I am sure there are people
> who will see these ~7000 objects as pure waste�� while I would say that we have already *now* the resources to be
> even more radical.
>
> Being radical in the context of Pharo is offering to remove stuff or layers :):)
>
> Thierry

It is obviously a compromise (or a continuum) between abstractions and performance.

But there should remain a focus on efficiency (not just speed but also memory), it is hard to fix these things years later.