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.
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 ?
Regards,