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Re: reducing time overhead of text display (in 1.1)
One thing which might provide a partial solution is improved documentation.
That is, attempt to explain the work (magic) that the high level CLIM
facilities do, and make it easy to use lower level facilities when that's
the right choice. In effect, much of this thread is doing just this.
I've had no trouble producing fast Lisp code. I'm convinced that one of the
reasons is that I have a basic understanding of computation going on. As a
simple example, things like the difference between nconc and append, and
the GC model for a particular Lisp implementation. This makes it easy to
choose the proper techniques, decide when to build my own stuff,
identify and fix performance bottlenecks, etc.
CLIM is tougher. I too had problems with slow performance of text displays
containing presentations. But, exactly what the alternates were to the high
level facilties was hard to determine.
If use of lower level facilities is a normal and expected activity, perhaps
the lower level facilities should have the same prominence in the
documentation as the higher level facilities.
CLIM documentation has been improving, and that's great. CLIM, like all
complex window systems, is very big. Just documenting the high level
facilities is a lot of work. However, it might help a lot. This is a
suggestion to the individual vendors for the documentation they produce,
and, to CLIM vendors jointly to the extent that they cooperate to produce
documentation.
--Jon Degenhardt
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