Hi Eric, On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 8:53 AM Eric Gade <eric.gade@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I know that others have posted about this before but I wanted to get the current status.
I've recently had to buy a new laptop that came with a HiDPI display. Generally (especially on Linux systems) this makes Pharo unusable. Though there are font size increase and scaling options in the Pharo system settings, these do not work as a solution -- buttons are still tiny, there is inconsistent scaling behavior across morphic, etc. The overall problem can be described as: in Pharo, one pixel equals one "point," and so the interface is incredibly small on these HiDPI screens (3k etc).
These HiDPI screens are becoming more common, both as laptop and as external displays. Their main advantage is that they can render text very crisply. In the HN post announcing the release of P7, there were one or two complaints about this issue. It does make it hard to demonstrate to others (as I do often) the power of developing in Pharo.
Here are some questions I have about this issue: 1) What is the current state of affairs in dealing with this issue, if any? 2) Would this require VM changes (I assume it would)? If so, what might those entail? 3) If this does require VM changes, I assume the Squeak people would want in on it? 4) Is the current plan to wait for Bloc to resolve these issues and/or would switching to Bloc resolve these issues at all anyway? 5) Related -- where can one start to learn about current VM architecture and development practices?
In the CONTRIBUTING.md and README.md and the HowToBuild files in each build.??? directory in the repository ( https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm.git). On the opensmalltalk-vm mailing list ( http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev). In several blog posts and papers on the VM.
That said I'm not here to just bellyache. While I don't have any VM experience, I'm willing to jump in and try to work on it if someone can point me in the right direction. Or perhaps this is too specialized a task...
No it is not :-). It is a learning task, but VM development is performed by humans for humans ;-)
Thanks
-- Eric
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot