ScreenRect bug or not

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Wieder

> Richard-
>
> Wednesday, June 4, 2014, 9:48:20 AM, you wrote:
>
>> There is an IDE rewrite underway, and a very large-scope effort to
>> improve overall rendering.
>
> Eh?

One of the problems with being OCD about my LiveCode consumption is that 
I can no longer recall where I hear things, whether it was in a 
newsletter article, a blog post, or the Global Jam chats Kevin and Ben 
hosted.

The IDE rewrite is AFAIK very early-stage, a logical necessity from the 
Open Language initiative and the implications thereof related to 
extensibility.  I imagine we'll be hearing more about it as it begins to 
move from sketchpad to code, but right now it's all about supporting OL 
so I don't believe there's much concrete that can be said about it until 
OL gets fleshed out more.

The rendering optimization has been ongoing for many builds, begun with 
acceleratedRendering and tiling, and continued with the introduction of 
Skia as the 2D graphics subsystem.  Because Skia is layer-based, the 
benefits of the tiling method are somewhat limited, so the team is 
exploring a more with-the-Skia-grain approach of focusing on buffered 
layers instead.  I'm not familiar with the intricacies, but given that 
so much of LiveCode's logic is layer-based I have to imagine this will 
bode well as a more flexible approach over the long term.

Much of the initial rendering optimization was focused on the needs of 
mobile platforms, but as Kevin reminds us most of the engine stuff for 
mobile tends to benefit all platforms.  Desktop apps are increasingly 
using dynamic Metro-style layouts, and even now we can see significant 
improvement with things like moving multiple objects simultaneously 
(even on Linux, where rendering speeds used to be abysmal).

I don't know the specific status of the layer-based optimization (maybe 
it's on those Global Jam chat videos), but I'm sure we'll be hearing 
more about it as it gets further along, either in the daily blog posts 
or the newsletter.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.org