Squeak 5.3 release notes describe arithmetic improvements. Nice. I crunch very big numbers, and these improvements therefore have value. Why would they not be included in OSVM (forked or not) and the basic class-set for both Squeak and Pharo?

The VM changes *are* in the VM code. If pharo haven't bothered to take advantage of them, that's their job to do. There are also image changes involved. Again, somebody has to do the work.

The obvious question is: Will Squeak be improving GUI look/behavior and speed with Spec2? If not, can I load Spec2 into Squeak so that I can do new GUI work there?

Unlikely and unlikely.

Both Squeak and Pharo have slow text selection. Pick any word in any pane, and double click it to select it.

Really? I can't detect any difference. And that's with the Squeak running on a Pi and VW on a big iMac. Yeah, it’s bad, and I often wonder why no one says anything about it. It definitely slows my work, and I’m not talking about the extra time for rendering. It’s mentally disruptive. It mostly depends on how you detect a double-click as opposed to a single, or a mouse-down-drag etc. I go by the definition of a double click: the button-up event of the second click ends the double-click event. Searching for and rendering of the selected text then begins. This takes roughly 75 to 100 ms consistently in Pharo and Squeak.

(Dolphin and VW have quick GUIs).

Never used Dolphin but I disagree about the (currnet)VW GUI; I'm using both for work right now and Squeak (again, on a Pi vs the VW/iMac) seems much faster to me. Note that I was specific about the current porting problem as it relates to GUI deficiencies. The problem is not about general GUI speed (like opening and closing windows), which is okay to good in VW, and better overall in Pharo, especially in a Spec2 component (the Launcher). This problem is about text selection speed. I’m running Windows 10 Pro on an 2.7 GHz Xeon with 96 GB. I just tried text selection again in Pharo 9 in a Playground and in VW 8.3.2’s Transcript. VW is much faster. This is stopping my port--that and the debugger’s slowness (even slower than the text selection). The porting problem for me reduces to two little, but extremely important GUI dynamics I experience frequently when coding.

Is speeding up the Pharo debugger with Spec2 a priority? I can’t think of a better GUI-related priority for Pharo.

Why ask that here? (I thought I was posting to the Pharo lists too; corrected above.) Font importer. It's right there in the Apps list, second row. Yes, I found it.

- Where in the Squeak and Pharo images can I change mouse-selection behavior to be leading-edge? Some of the Squeak panes have this; others don’t. I want leading-edge action in all panes, and wish the feature were in Preferences/Settings.

As a general UI point, leading edge action is rarely a good thing. I use leading edge single clicks all the time for most of the last 25 years of Smalltalk coding. The choice is for me as dev, not for clients. The issue is once again about high-speed continuity of gesture and thought during coding. Eliminating the delay matters. I’ve had time to try it both ways. Shaping