> On Jan 23, 2015, at 1:53 PM, Michael Crawford <mdcrawf...@gmail.com> 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 _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
