[MACTCL] OS X Performance

[Steven <ste...@ya...>]

I took my new intel macbook on holidays last week.
OS X is such a great operating system. But its slow and buggy Wish is possibly the only thing stopping me from leaving Linux.

Can anyone summarise technically why Wish is so slow at redrawing on OSX?

I guess it's to do with OSX's amazing desktop image compositing layer, but have never found anything that explicitly explains it.

Thanks for your work.

Steven


--- On Fri, 9/9/11, Steven <ste...@ya...> wrote:

> From: Steven <ste...@ya...>
> Subject: Re: [MACTCL] Have to click twice
> To: kw...@co...
> Cc: Tc...@li..., "Gilles PLUME" <pl...@ma...>
> Received: Friday, 9 September, 2011, 4:27 PM
> Thanks for the reply :)
> 
> Steven wrote:
> 
> > > With multi window apps, a friend has been
> lamenting
> > having to click twice when switching between windows
> (ie -
> > one click to get focus, another click to activate a
> widget),
> > which is unlike on Linux and Windows.
> ...
> > > Has anyone successfully tried this, or worked
> around
> > the "have to click twice" issue in some other way ?
> Perhaps
> > it's possible with an Operating System tweak, or even
> a
> > custom compilation of Tcl, which we already include
> with our
> > App (http://scidvspc.sf.net) because of problems with Snow
> > Leopard's Wish 8.5.7.
> 
> Kevin wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure I see the issues you are reporting. I
> have
> > downloaded your
> > app and can click on a button in a background window
> > ("click-through"
> > behavior) just fine.
> 
> This is very suprising. On our systems, with numerous Tcl
> builds  we haven't been able to do this. 
> 
> > In any event, the build of Tk you are using appears to
> be
> > obsolete--it's
> > based on Carbon as far as I can tell. No bugs in that
> > branch of Tk are
> > being fixed at this point.
> 
> And this is also very suprising. While i'm mainly concerned
> with finding a click-through solution, (as we now longer
> have known bugs with our built-in framework), i have to
> comment on this.
> 
> Considering the amount and severity of bugs in tk-cocoa (re
> the "[MACTCL] Screen redraw in Tk-Cocoa--sluggish, no
> updates, multiple drawing of buttons" thread), i can't
> imagine how you suggest using it for our project, which
> handles huge databases and is a serious Chess database app -
> generally rivalling commercial products.
> 
> Reliability is everything in a database, and bugs in OSX
> Tcl is definitely the issue for us. The 32 bit build we use
> is the only one that works for us, after weeks and months of
> trial and error, messing with SnowLeopard's Wish, and
> learning how to build our own. Our app is very resource
> intensive, and probably exposes lots of frailities in OSX
> wish that are otherwise hard to pin-point.
> 
> (For example, on wish-8.5.7 it performs perfectly on Linux
> and Windows, but using Snow-Leopards Wish-8.5.7, the program
> crashes shortly after loading any moderate sized PGN file or
> database. And exhibits *unusual* behaviour and coredumps
> when using tk_dialog shortly before program exit. The
> program can be linked against your systems Framework by
> downloading source ( https://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=263836&filename=scid_vs_pc-4.5.tgz
> ), and installing into /usr/local with "./configure
> && make install && scid". Here http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/tmp/sa.tar.bz2 is a
> small database containing 30,000 chess games. The maximum
> database size is ~ 16 million.)
> 
> Anyway, i understand your desire to move people to Cocoa,
> but considering the issues you have, which reflect our
> frustrating testing .... we are definitely using Carbon. (
> And I should mention my OSX packager feverently wanted to
> use Cocoa, but gave in after much frustration).
> 
> We could suggest using Scid vs. Mac as a stress test for
> Tcl/Tk. It does so admirably ;> But i've found debugging
> it's coredumps very hard, though OS X *does* provide
> detailed backtraces, and the OS has never crashed for either
> of us i think.
> 
> ----------------------
> 
> Sorry to take up so much of your time, but back to our
> small problem which hardly matters really ;>
> 
> I thought it was a known fact that Tk toplevels didn't have
> click-through on OS X. (ie - when one ScidvsMac toplevel has
> focus, clicking a button on another toplevel (say, the
> game-list) doesn't actuate the button, but merely gives the
> other toplevel focus.)
> 
> I don't suppose others can verify whether the App 
> ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/scidvspc/files/mac/ScidvsMac-4.5.dmg/download)
> which should definitely link to our Tk Framework AFAIK,
> "clicks through" (or not) for them. 
> 
> The App is an i386/PPC universal, (though PPC seems immune
> to all of the serious bugs that we had, despite testing with
> tcl-8.5.7 on the PPC box).
> 
> cheers, Steven
> 
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