Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster
From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Append menu is slow.
Keywords: AppendMenu menu slow efficiency
Message-ID: <29122@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 10 May 89 01:20:00 GMT
References: <89May9.171757edt.11077@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 19

In article <89May9.171757edt.11077@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> dudek@ai.toronto.edu (Gregory Dudek) writes:
>  I am using AppendMenu to make some big menus and it is slowwwwww (i.e. on
>the order of 5 seconds on a Mac Plus).

AppendMenu doesn't know that you are going to be calling it again
immediately, so it calls CalcMenuSize(), which does a linear scan over
the menu to see how wide the menu should be by doing a StringWidth() on
each item.

The structure of menus is documented in Inside Mac. Menu items are
basically pascal strings followed by four bytes of extra information. At
the end of the muenu is a null byte.  You can use Munger to insert items
into a menu, then call CalcMenuSize() yourself after you are all done.

If you are really paranoid, you can copy and renumber the current menu
definition procedure and set up your menu to use it. That will guarantee
that if Apple ever changes the format of standard menus, and the MDEF to
run them, that your menus will still work.  I think this is over-paranoia
myself.