yes, they've accepted our prs. But I'm not sure 'we' are up to keeping an
entire gui toolkit up-to-date with API changes, in addition to pd itself.
There's a reason that a gui toolkit is used, rather than building one from
scratch. Sure, I can open issues to fix alpha channels for checkbuttons or help
menu ordering issues (the latter of which I've helped fix on their end) but
when it comes to event handling that scope becomes quite a bit larger.
And if we are up to doing dev work on tcl/tk and accepting that responsibility,
then we should open some prs to make recent tcl/tk reasonably performant on
macos. But that hasn't happened. It's great if someone could take on that job
but as relatively small open source projects idk if anyone will.The fact is
that seemingly, newer versions of tcl/tk have pretty bad performance on macos.
But the tcl/tk team doesn't even seem to be sure why the performance is bad.
Maybe we're calling 'update' inappropriately or something, but other than that
it is tk's responsibility and they haven't solved the issue. (and imo the
frequency of calling 'update' shouldn't be platform-dependent.. though that
might be unavoidable..).In addition, tk's own devs seem to reference an 'api
churn' by macos: Tk Source Code: View Ticket (tcl-lang.org) so at least THEY
agree that MacOS deprecates APIs more frequently than on the other main
platforms.
I don't even mind MacOS deprecating things frequently, I just think a gui
toolkit as old and small as tcl/tk is ill-equipped to adapt to it. Maybe their
architecture just can't deal with it well either, and/or there is some kind of
'tech debt' in that regard? idkAlso personally I like tcl/tk, I just think
MacOs isn't as well supported as it could be, and the MacOs devs often seem
eager to take an 'it's not an issue' attitude even when whatever it is
certainly is an issue. (but again, it's an open source project that may be too
small to get enough support for these changes)
-seb
On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 02:05:57 AM PDT, Dan Wilcox
<[email protected]> wrote:
I disagree with this assessment.
In recent years the macOS maintenance of Tk picked up quite a bit and it is
*much better* than before. It was always reacting as opposed to staying on top
of platform changes but they at least have integrated changes from our end for
sticky things like the key handling issues.
I also disagree that macOS has “constantly changing” APIs and associated FUD.
Most changes are well documented in advanced and major changes often leave
deprecation mechanism in places for many years after (ie. Carbon). That these
updates come as a surprise to open source developers who don’t keep up with all
the minutia (myself much included) is not always Apples fault.
Should we stick with Tk forever? Possibly not, but I don’t see issues like this
as always the next reason to drop it ASAP consider how difficult cross-platform
development is due to platform differences. It’s disappointing but kinda “par
for the course.”
enohp ym morf tnes
-----------
Dan Wilcox
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com
> On Jul 15, 2023, at 9:18 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>
> From: Sebastian Shader <[email protected]>
> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
> Subject: [PD-dev] performance of different Wish versions
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> From my brief interactions with making prs for tk, my impression was that
> Wish development on macos isn't very healthy.Probably partly due to MacOS
> changing APIs all the time and leaving developers to figure out how to
> migrate in the best way.
> There are a few different threads regarding performance issues with recent
> wish and MacOS, but unless someone investigates it and opens up a ticket with
> Tk to fix it it probably won't get fixed.
> Tcl/tk that isn't recent has some little things that don't really work on
> macos, so there's really nothing to be done on the pd side aside from
> switching to another gui toolkit entirely.
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