I haven't seen is the instability of the VM you mention, it has worked pretty well for my average use, although the UX is not straightforward.

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Yes, lots of redirection and extra steps.�� Many degrees of freedom. ��Seemingly no good default ���happy��� path to simplify things a little before you start to investigate the variations/choices.

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> The other thing that keeps me planted firmly in VW is the sheer speed of it.

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I don't know if there are recent benchmarks, but I've felt Pharo to be really fast compared to VW when it comes to computing.

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I���ve don���t plenty of informal comparative testing mostly with the GUI. ����I���ve used VW continuously for 29 years and Pharo on and off since 2006.�� (I���m really trying to port, but I keep failing to do it; getting closer).�� ��VW is still noticeably quicker in GUI responsiveness, in most cases. ��One big difference is the Pharo HTTP client, with all those wonderful primitives.�� It���s about twice as fast as VW���s.�� Bravo.�� I meant to tell that to Sven recently, and forgot.

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> Pharo looks generally much better, but it���s mushy, and that���s a problem.�� VW is not.

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Working regularly with VW or VAST when I go back to Pharo the "mushiness" is significantly noticeable, but if you open a Pharo 3 image (or even Pharo 4) you'll feel it really "snappy", but of course you'll lose all the improvements since then; and that's the current tradeoff.���

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Yeah, I guess all the new slick GUIs are a bit heavier.�� This machine is just okay for speed ���2.7 GHz Xeon, but VW feels okay.�� Pharo tends to put me slowly to sleep with the tiny but noticeable lags here and there.���� I���m very fond of GT.�� Beautiful.���� Not sure what to do go get the GUI quickness back.�� Maybe you ��guys are waiting for the new GUI framework(s) to firm up?���� I tried Cuis, and was not impressed.�� It���s too lean/Spartan and still not very fast (slower in some ways than Pharo).�� I like the Pharo creature-comforts (who wouldn���t?).��

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I never understood the reason for the incremental slowdown, it is even present in "modern" tools such as GTToolkit.

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Yes, it���s like a creeping disease.�� Lol

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Another thing I miss enough to want to implement (or fake-out somehow) is Alt-tabbing as a way to get around thru your browsers. Usually I have 4 to 6 up at once, if I���m behaving, and as many as 20 if I���m not.���� Looking about for the tabs at the bottom to click is not nearly as fun as Alt-Tabbing.�� Maybe I could emulate Alt-Tab with Alt-Shift-Tab���a bit of a finger twister, but it might work.

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You can take a look at that project for that : https://github.com/juliendelplanque/Mirage

> Gestural dynamics are very quick, well under 100 ms latency, often less than 20 ms.

> I���m seeing 100, 150, and 200 ms regularly in Pharo.�� It���s too mushy, and that slows the mind.

> Any developer understands this, whether he talks about it or not.

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This is true, below 20ms is ideal, and top-notch CLI terminals are benchmarking this as a selling point (using stuff like https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer), Sublime, TextEdit, Notepad++ measure sub 10ms latency.

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Indeed.

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My whole nervous system definitely feels this speed effect and starts to thought-glide better below these tiny latencies.�� I���m sure many reading this have had similar experiences.�� Something similar happens when you are fortunate enough to use a machine with extremely fast striped SSD drives, where you literally don���t wait for anything, except the bloody internet.�� This doesn���t just change the speed at which you do the work.�� It reorganizes your mind and skills in ways you had not anticipated because you can flow so much more quickly, making connections further forward and backward in your thought stream.�� My point is that if the speed and low-latencies are made a priority, we can attract users just on this basis alone.�� Even I would be working harder at improving Pharo (and complaining less) if everything were snappy.�� I would probably just get on with doing the needed tasks.�� Interesting how that works.�� Speed:�� it changes you.�� It changes the whole game.

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> So I���m wondering when the Pharo GUI will snap as well as VW.

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Maybe with native widgets there will be a significant speedup, although I don't know whether the lag comes from rendering time or from something else.

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I would like to know more about the native widgets in Pharo.�� Does anyone know when this is likely to happen?

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But VW event model is not better than Pharo's, so it might be something else.

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I���ve not looked into the details, but I will sometimes just repeatedly click on a method name and watch how long the code pane takes to render in VW and Pharo, and I don���t get what Pharo could be doing to make that time so long.�� Both are indexing into the sources file or the changes file to get some text, and then there is the TT-font rendering, which is probably where the CPU cycles are going.�� I should look into if further, but I���m sure someone reading this knows enough about the rendering path to say where the bottleneck is.

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Cheers,

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Shaping