Eyes Above The Waves

I'm working flat out to get new-textframe ready for turning on by Tuesday (PDT, which means really Wednesday here). The main issues left are performance and word selection/caret movement. The former is more difficult and interesting than the latter. I've identified and addressed a few issues:

• On very large blocks, we could burn a lot of time scanning from the start of the block to find a place to start (re)building textruns for text that has changed. I changed this to scan backwards from the changed text, which is more complex but more efficient.
  
• On Mac we were hurting badly in some situations where new-textframe was computing slightly larger font heights than other parts of the code; we'd end up adding overflow rects everywhere which turned out to be quite expensive. I fixed that by making font height float-to-int conversion consistently more conservative.
  
• We were spending a lot more time in the platform text engine (e.g. ATSUI) with new textframe in some cases, for two reasons. We were failing to cache textruns when the textrun was relying on the DOM text node for text storage to save memory. This was easily fixed by disabling that "optimization". Also, the old textframe effectively caches textruns for individual words, which can save a lot of time in text that uses the same words repeatedly. I replicated this optimization for the new textframe. In fact the new textframe is even smarter; given a new string to build a textrun for, it looks up each word in the cache and makes a new string containing all the words that were not found in the cache, passing that to the platform text engine. This gives us the best of both worlds: avoids measuring any word more than once, but still passes reasonably long strings to the platform text engine (the engines have considerable overhead and passing words down one at a time is not recommended!).
  

All this activity is why I've been a little slow on reviews lately. Things should lighten up by the end of this week...

... Except that I also have to prepare for a talk I'm giving at the Auckland Web "Meet-Up" this Thursday night. It sounds like there'll be over 100 people there and it should be a lot of fun. This will probably be the first ever public demo of Chris' <video> tag support, which is starting to look (and sound) really good! The office grooves to the sweet sound of ukuleles...

Also next week on Tuesday I'm going to be in Wellington giving a similar talk to the mini-Webstock that evening. And I'm taking the chance to visit Victoria University, give a talk there, meet some of the staff and students in the CS department, and hopefully do a little recruiting. Phew!

Still working on a good name for the Chronicle debugger. Current candidate: Chronologer.