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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Comments on "Why Can't We Do This?"
Feed Title: Pollock
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/pollock-rss.xml
Feed Description: Pollock - the next VW GUI
"Sames, I've read all of the good rastering posts you did. One thing remains fuzzy for me though. You can buy these little cameras that go on top of your monitor. And they always come with an app that can full screen show nearly real time feedback from the camera on the video screen. Will we ever be able to do that kind of performance in VW?"
Never is a long time, so I can't say never. But, it will probably be somewhere close to that. One of the great things we hype about VisualWorks is it's cross platform abilities. However, it also limits the things we can do to some extent. For instance, we have no way of making a general abstract notion of hardware in the VM much less then representing some such abstraction in the Image.
A hand tuned application, can say it is for a specific OS, and even install drivers or versions of such helper libraries such as DirectX or OpenGL in order to do it's work. We really can't do that, mostly, because we have so many platforms and kinds of hardware we support. Thus, our hardware abstraction, to the extent that we have one at all, and the software environment it lives in, must, by definition, be very simple. For instance, we run on all kinds of hardware/software combinations: Sparc, Sun, AIX, SGI, Windows, Intel, X11, XFree, Linux, Motorolla, G3, G4, G5, Mac8, Mac9, OSX... etc. You see, that's quite a range of levels, from lowest hardware (CPU) to machines, to OSs.
When you buy that little camera, I bet it doesn't have software to run on a SGI machine... Or a Sun... Or an AIX machine. So, those camera companies ignore it, since it is easy for them to ignore that area of the market, no doubt because their market plans say they can do quite well in the Windows only market (or maybe Window and Mac), thank you very much.
The point is, whatever that software is doing, either via a driver, a helper library or calls into the OS for managing the environment where the video system does it's thing, it is doing it for that environment, for that platform, in a way it knows it has control. The VisualWorks VM's environment can not make any of these assumptions. They simply are not guaranteed to exist, and in fact DO NOT exist, on all of the platforms and OSs we support.
This, brings us to one of those things that will always be an issue with VisualWorks. While "you" can always get to the environment on a specific hardware/OS combination via our various DLLCC connect systems, we don't put abstractions into the VM that are not portable.
But this isn't the final word. The final word is quite open to you. First, with the coming of the "User Primitive Plugin" (aka Squeak FFI Plugin system) in 7.2 (in preview), you'll be able to do all of that much easier yourself. Second, with the splitting of the GUI out from the OE and now being a loadable module itself, you could, if you so chose, to write an OpenGL or DirectX (or XFree or XN or whatever) version of the GUI module yourself.
The question as to if we will ever do such platform local modules, the answer is, well, maybe, when all of the rest of our present GUI plans are done. Oh, and have I mentioned that we have about 5 years of GUI plans?
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