Re: What's up with the Cocoa Text System?
Re: What's up with the Cocoa Text System?
- Subject: Re: What's up with the Cocoa Text System?
- From: Michael Crawford <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 14:38:47 -0800
Cocoa Text is glacially slow compared to what it would be had Apple
offered me the developer tools job I interviewed for in 2001.
Perhaps, when interviewing with the Xocde team, it might not have been
a bad idea to avoid criticizing Xcode. I made it quite clear that I
was unimpressed with Mac OS X in general, and to this day, I regard
Mac OS System 8.1 as the very finest System Software release Apple has
ever produced.
Are you familiar with the term "Bozo Filter"?
More or less, I won't accept a job offer, unless I can call my
potential employer a jackass directly to his face - then have him
agree that he is, in fact, a jackass.
No doubt you expect that I am of very modest means. I was quite
wealthy at one time, but my money did not do me a whole lot of good.
Michael David Crawford, Consulting Software Engineer
email@hidden
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/
Available for Software Development in the Portland, Oregon Metropolitan
Area.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Jens Alfke <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Jan 23, 2015, at 1:53 PM, Michael Crawford <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> At one time I found it quite painful to edit source code with Xcode.
> I was told that was due to Xcode using the Cocoa text widget.
>
> Consider that Lightspeed C worked just fine, snappy and responsive, on
> my 6 MHz 68000 Mac 512k (or was it 8 MHz).
>
>
> I used Lightspeed C too. Its editor didn't support Unicode, or any languages
> outside the basic Roman alphabet. That's a significant quality-of-life issue
> for programmers whose first language isn't English. It also didn't do live
> syntax checking or code folding. In fact it only supported monospaced
> single-color text (no syntax highlighting.)
>
> The Cocoa text system compares to that editor, or MacWrite, the way
> Photoshop compares to a crayon. And some of those features may seem like
> nice-to-have frills to Americans (contextual forms, ligatures, bidirectional
> layout, pop-up text input panels) but are must-haves for languages written
> by the majority of the world's people.
>
> I'm sure that if we resurrected the Lightspeed C engine, it would let you
> type at about ten million words-per-minute on today's computers. So what?
> The editor only needs to be fast enough to keep up with human fingers. The
> rest of the CPU time can be dedicated to extra features.
>
> Cocoa Text isn't slow. (And it wasn't slow on a Power Mac G3 back in the day
> either.) One guy is having some nasty slowdowns that seem to be caused by
> something incidental, not an intrinsic problem with the text system.
>
> --Jens
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