[sugar] On improving Sugar performance

[Gary C Martin]

First, thanks Tomeu (and others involved), that's a fab list that may  
be coming down the pipe. I'd followed some of those items through  
joyride, but others were silent runners for me. Great to hear about  
them!

On 28 Apr 2008, at 17:09, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

>> Anyone is of course welcome to join us with questions, answers and
>> proposals.  To keep the discussion relaxed, we do not require backing
>> each and every idea with benchmark results, which in some cases are
>> hard to obtain.  Nevertheless, measuring is a useful tool, especially
>> when there there's disagreement on how effective each solution  
>> might be.
>
> Sure, but rather than a useful tool, I would call measuring as the
> only possible base on which decide actual work that needs to be done.
> We could be refactoring and recoding for years and don't get any
> noticeable improvement, if we don't measure.


Not that I want to start a CS grad war here, but with more than one  
foot in the UI camp, I just wanted to request that more than just  
'clock watching'  is done when selecting/implementing optomisations –  
though 'clock watching' is a very good place to start.

	http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html

Catering for subjective human response is tricky, but once you've  
passed some minimum threshold for utility** you can often win more  
hearts and minds going for the subjective. A concrete example I'd  
point to is smooth animation; activity switching with no nasty redraw  
flicker; pulsing icons with no visible strobe; and frame/notification  
transitions that glide smoothly onto the display giving the illusion  
of effortlessness.

**how many hours must I have spent as a kid, excitedly waiting for  
some software to load up off a magnetic tape, only to have it fail a  
fair portion of the time and have to start the tape over again... and  
some folks here moan about a ~6sec launch time for an activity. Though  
it's true to argue that those old machines did have instant on, even  
if you were left to ponder a BASIC prompt and spend the next 5min  
trying to tune your TV in to get a clear signal :-)

- Gary