Re: toward a more efficient event loop

Hi Nicolas --

I also noticed that the overall responsiveness on macOS is not great 
compared to Windows. Especially the way macOS mouse-wheel events arrive 
is annoying.

We should improve on that. Some of your observations are 
platform-specific behavior. We must cross-check improvements across all 
major platforms.

Best
Marcel

Am 22.08.2026 um 21:18 schrieb Nicolas Cellier:
> Hi all,
> if you compare Cuis morphic feel to Squeak morphic feel, the former 
> looks snappy, the latter sluggish.
> Especially if your trackpad generates a bunch of MouseWheelEvent 
> (MouseScrollEvent in Cuis) whenever you're willing to scroll.
> Why is that?
>
> Squeak World goes through an interCyclePause:  at every mouse event.
> Indeed, when the hand *processEvents* it stops at first mouse event 
> encountered.
>
> Hence, unless you are ready to sacrifice some battery life with a 
> PreferenceshigherPerformance,
> the event buffer might take several seconds to drain with such 
> strategy, especially on mac.
> It makes the user experience somehow catastrophic.
>
> Cuis has a different strategy:
> - processEvents drains the event buffer.
>   however, it only processes one mouse move event per cycle, and drops 
> the other ones.
> - the world cycle doesn't pause if (lastCycleHadAnyEvent or: [ 
> deferredUIMessages isEmpty not ])
> - it also does not pause further than the next morphic step or alarm
> - the pause grows gradually from 20 to 200ms whenever there is no activity
>   but at least %)ms in server mode
>
>  Maybe it's time to revise our strategy too !
>
> Nicolas
>
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