[self-interest] questions

[Steve Dekorte]

On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 08:10 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 June 2003 05:35, Steve Dekorte wrote:
>> Is Self's JIT code written in such a way that there is a layer that
>> be useful as a library outside of Self?
>
> No - it is very tightly integrated into the rest of the VM. Some more
> library-like JITs that might be of interest to you are:
>
>   http://www.gnu.org/directory/libs/gnulightning.html
>   http://www-sor.inria.fr/projects/vvm/realizations/ccg/ccg.html

I've tried lightning but it's buggy on PPC. I hadn't seen ccg before - 
it looks great. Thanks!

> Since the GUI isn't 3D (though I started a project to make it so back 
> in
> 1998) I am not sure OpenGL would help much.

The advantage is much, much faster rendering(2d, or 3d). Self is 
painfully slow(dragging an outliner around involves waiting for it to 
catch up with the mouse) on my dual 1.2Ghz Mac and I'm guessing(hoping) 
it's because of the rendering costs. I suspect Self is like Squeak and 
handing off chunks of a screen buffer stored in RAM to the desktop 
rendering APIs. Since this involves heavy use of the CPU(which is poor 
piece of rendering hw) and pushing each bit across the bus, it's a very 
slow way to render.

Cheers,
Steve
"Statically typed languages are like American sports cars.
They go fast, but only in a straight line"