[plt-scheme] Re: Status of FrTime

From: Gregory Cooper (greg at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 11 09:25:30 EDT 2005

Hi Noel,

Improving the documentation is on my list of to-dos (I assume you have 
looked at the doc.txt file), though I have a lot on my plate for the 
foreseeable future.  If you have questions, I'm more than happy to help, 
and I can probably update the docs on demand.

There may be some things I could do to improve the performance, but if 
you're using a Mac, I'd be inclined to blame most of the problem on that. 
I've run it on fast G4s, including my own Powerbook, and the animations 
are much, much, much slower than on any Intel-based machine I've used 
(with either Linux or Windows).  Surprisingly, the animations are actually 
faster (performance is acceptable) if I run DrScheme remotely on a Linux 
box and send the display to my Mac over X11.  I could do some experiments 
to try and determine if there's anything I can do within FrTime itself, 
but I'm not too hopeful.  Sorry about that.

Also, I haven't updated the version in the PLT repository for quite a 
while, but I (and a student) have been making a lot of significant 
improvements to the language itself, which should be available soon. 
Some of them may improve performance.  We're also working to replace the 
hacky animation library with TexPict.

Greg

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Noel Welsh wrote:
> FrTime is cool, but lacks two things:
>
>  - documentation
>
>  - speed
>
> The later is more of a concern -- on my 1.3GHz Powerbook
> the simple animations respond really badly to mouse
> movements.  (I'm using 299.106-cvs24may2005.)  I think a
> modern machine is sufficient to animate a couple of
> circles, so I'm wondering if this a DrScheme/MrEd problem,
> an OS X problem, or a FrTime problem, and if it will be
> fixed.  There are a couple of projects I'd like to use
> FrTime for, one GUI based and one web based, but if the
> performance is going to be this poor it will be unusable.
>
> Cheers,
> Noel
>
> Email: noelwelsh <at> yahoo <dot> com   noel <at> untyped <dot> com
> AIM: noelhwelsh
> Blogs: http://monospaced.blogspot.com/  http://www.untyped.com/untyping/
>
>
>
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