On 11-Jan-07, at 2:48 PM, Daniel L. Taylor wrote:
With due respect to RS, I have to confess that parts of the IDE don't seem to have a good underlying architecture. I really have to wonder why editing a class with, say, 250 methods should take any more time than one with 2 methods if the underlying data representation is correct, whether in RAM or on disk. Why should selecting and copying method 250 take longer than method 1, and why should either take a noticeable amount of time? Why should typing in a method in said class of 250 methods be more sluggish than a class with 10?
Yup, there's definitely some serious speed problems with the IDE, and some are easy to reproduce:
<http://realsoftware.com/feedback/viewreport.php?reportid=mxygccez>
The forms layout seems like it could be better as well, though seeing the difference between Mac and Windows here makes me think half the problem on the Mac is simply Quartz. You have to work pretty hard if you want Quartz to behave any better than an old bus at a stop light.
Quartz is going to slow things down - no question - but the IDE (and RB apps in general) are _really_ bad at limiting screen updates to stuff that actually needs to be updated. The window UI editor refreshes the entire canvas whenever anything changes, and if that change triggers a control elsewhere to change (like a scrollbar, or a field in the property editor) then the whole IDE window refreshes. The fact that the whole window redraws when a single control element is manipulated makes the IDE slower all around, especially for things like scrolling through code. The code editor itself has some typing optimizations, but blank regions past the last line are redrawn on every keypress, and some actions (like deleting a single character) cause the whole window to refresh. The framework could use some serious work in this area - selecting one line in a listbox should refresh that one line, not the entire listbox, and certainly not the whole window, but that's exactly what RB does :/
Frank. <http://developer.chaoticbox.com/> _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
