Re: macOS metal rendering engine in mac port

[Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org>]

On Sun, May 23, 2021 at 09:13:51AM -0700, Aaron Jensen wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2021 at 4:47 AM Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Mine are fairly consistent. I imagine hitting thermal would hurt
> > > though and Intel macs love to do that.
> >
> > Yeah, I wonder if that's what's happening. I have to say that I don't
> > think this Mac has ever been what I'd consider fast. My ancient first
> > gen i7 absolutely wipes the floor with it in compilation speed
> > despite being at least 7 years older. I guess Moores law really did
> > run out of steam. ;)
> 
> I'm curious what chip you have? I have a 2.4 GHz I9-9980HK and it's
> not slow to compile, but the linux machine I was using for a while
> demolished it. Of course, that was a 16 core 3950X, so...

It's a 2.7GHz i5 with two real cores and Iris graphics.

> Interesting. And generally speaking, are there licensing issues
> preventing a merge/collaboration w/ the mac port?

We already use the Mac port font backend (although I suspect they may
have diverged a little over time). Other than that I don't know how
much "collaboration" would be practical, and anything else would be simply
throwing the NS port out altogether and replacing it with the Mac
port, although then it would be subject to the same rules as the NS
port which may or may not be to Yamamoto Mitsuharu's taste.

I don't really care one way or the other, I'm already using my new
ThinkPad as my daily driver and it would be quite nice to see the back
of the people on Reddit telling me I'm actively harming the Free
Software movement by maintaining the NS port instead of letting it die
so everyone is forced to use the Mac port.

> > It's a lot of work. I'd have to be sure that the patch actually stops
> > the flashing and blanking before I tried that. I'm not hopeful, tbh.
> 
> I've been using it and haven't seen any flickers. I'll continue using
> it and report back. I probably would have seen one by now.

My configuration seems to not even work with Emacs 27 any more, so I
can't properly use it myself.

-- 
Alan Third