2018-04-09 11:02 GMT+02:00 Serge Stinckwich <serge.stinckwich@gmail.com>:

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 9:54 AM, Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier@gmail.com> wrote:
2018-04-09 9:14 GMT+02:00 Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I think it might be more interesting to start the review from the usage of it, not from the internals.

Well, from the usage of it, I've seen nothing that doesn't fit into
the yagt. I've seen that field evolve and try clever things, really
different things, and Bloc does not look like one of thoses.

> Indeed, Bloc is primarily an engineering effort. But, there are a couple of things that make it rather different from other solutions. For example:
> - Only one rendering tree in all cases. This works also for graph visualizations that work with any element without imposing knowledge about edges in the base system. We think this is quite important, and especially when combined with a performant rendering, it can open new doors for UI design.

Look, from the point of view of the man of the art, it doesn't seems
like a breakthrough.

Do we need a breakthrought for UI ?
No !
We need something that works that's it, stable software with good documentation and tests.
After that people can build the next-UI if they want, but this is build on solid foundations.

Agreed. And this is where it is critical.

I used Morphic since Self 3.0, beginning of my PhD (1994, I think), followed it to the beginning of Squeak (1998). When I came back to Pharo in 2011, I was horrified by what it has became: a monster of thousands over thousands of buggy lines.

And now I see a replacement, that, before going into production, is already at 45k lines? And with a planned, huge dependency on the GUI lib of another project?

Do you imagine how it will be, 10 years down the line?

Do you think it will be the stable foundation you're looking for?

Compared to other smalltalk-based solutions, yes, it may be seen as an
improvement.

I think you underestimate how advanced that field has been / is, and
how far behind the state of the art are industrial solutions.

There is only one development in the Smalltalk space in GUI that is
worthy of interest for me: the anti-aliasing of Juan Vuletich. It
would have so much impact overall (remove all dependencies on external
libs, remove the need to do font anti-aliasing, scrap thousands of
lines of slow and ugly Smalltalk code, simplify the FreeType
infrastructure, remove MBs of external librairies, ensure long-term
porting ease / code evolution).

M
aybe this was a breakthrought, but how many users ?

Very few users. Juan has not yet implemented it.

Regards,

Thierry

Regards,
--
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (SU/IRD/UY1)
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

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