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From: hadeishi@husc7.HARVARD.EDU (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: problems with the amiga user interface... (really Suntools)
Message-ID: <1433@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Mar-87 22:35:03 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.1433
Posted: Wed Mar 18 22:35:03 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Mar-87 04:15:03 EST
References: <50@mit-prep.ARPA> <3500003@nucsrl.UUCP> <2811@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> <444@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: news@husc6.UUCP
Reply-To: hadeishi@husc7.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 33
Summary: Code size of Suntools is horrendous

Re: Suntools, interfaces, code size

	Intuition does have a tremendous advantage over Suntools and
other UNIX-based windowing systems in that it is an *interrupt-driven
process* that runs on top of everything else in the system.  Plus,
accessing Intuition involves calling a reentrant library which multiple
processes can share; all of the window/menu/screen management routines
are compact and sharable, unlike Suntools which requires that every
Suntools application link in a HUGE library of window management routines.
Because Intuition is an interrupt-driven process running at high priority
it is always very responsive no matter what the load is on the machine
at the time.  Contrast this to any UNIX windowing system, which, by
the nature of the UNIX interface, tend to bog down and even go DEAD for
many seconds when something processor-intensive is going on.  (I remember
when I was running a simple fractal generator on a Sun 3, Suntools
slowed down by a factor of about 100.  Just sending a window to the
back was an excruciating task, and watching the window sloooowwwwly
erase itself, redraw, and have the other windows slooooowly become
aware that they need to refresh, was quite amusing and took all of about
thirty seconds or so.  This was on a MONOchrome Sun, with only the
fractal generator running (heavily processor intensive) and other
tasks just sitting around waiting for input.)  The interrupt-priority
scheme on the Amiga is particularly well designed; the things you expect
to happen fast, happen fast, all the time, no matter what, and the things
you might expect to depend on system and blitter load depend on system
and blitter load.  Thus Intuition manages to present a very consistent
and "intuitive" user interface while remaining very small and requiring
almost no overhead on the part of user programs.  THAT's a good design,
and I think we should all credit RJ, Carl Sassenrath, Dale Luck, and the
many other software people at C-A for such a well-thought-out and
high performance/overhead user interface.

					-Mitsu