I’m running Xojo 2018R3. First let me say that dark mode is beautiful, and the interface is getting better and better. You guys are doing a great job there. Incremental compiling is also huge improvement. THANK YOU.
However, now that I’ve been actually spending the last few weeks in 2018R3 heavily, working on a fairly large project (27MB project file)… man this thing is SO slow… it’s extremely hard to work in. Things I’m noticing:
Clicking takes 1-4 seconds to register. Every time. Opening a new tab takes many seconds. Many times when I double-click a control to edit the code, it moves a few pixels before the code editor opens. I have to eagle eye it constantly and undo the move, because the double-clicking is registering so slowly that it’s triggering a drag/move before it knows I’ve double-clicked. This alone is a HUGE issue, drastically slowing down my productivity. My neatly aligned controls and UI is being constantly fiddled with. Sometimes I don’t even notice it until much later, and it’s just lucky that I do see the controls mis-aligned.
Switching to the code editor is slow and cumbersome, but once I’m there, typing is even worse. If there’s more than 1-2 dozen lines of code, it slows to an absolute crawl. I’ve tested this on multiple Macs, all with modern builds and high-end specs, and always get the same result. Performance is just painful…
I know this has been discussed many times before, even by me. But basically this post has two purposes:
-
To congratulate the XOJO team on the interface and improvements of the IDE visually and functionally. It is really feeling mature since the initial redesign back in 2014 or whatever it was.
-
To beg, PLEADE, IMPLORE you now to focus on performance. This sluggishness is absolutely killing my productivity. It’s physically making me so much slower when working on projects, and mentally fatiguing me so much faster than if things were performing better.
Example: I made a change to a class and had to manually move code in about 100 controls throughout the project from one event to another custom event. This should have taken about 20 minutes. Bug it took over two hours, and I had to take several breaks. Moving through the error list, each click took 5+ seconds to switch to that part of the project and bring up the code. Then cutting the code, making a new event handler, pasting the code, and deleting the old event handler took over 30 seconds. Every single time. This is 3-4 moves with keyboard shortcuts that should take 3-5 seconds tops.
The slow response is also causing a lot of issues where I click something and press delete to get rid of it, and then the wrong control/method/etc gets deleted because it never registered my click. The whole thing is just a mess.
Is there any hope, a small prayer, that the next version(s) you guys are working on will really address this sluggish performance? It’s been a long-time issue, and I know you had other priorities. Where are we at now with this new release? If it was more responsive, it would be a truly great IDE and a pleasure to use.
Sorry to gripe, and again I want to say how happy and impressed I am with the work you’ve done in other areas. It’s really looking great. It hasn’t crashed on me at all, it’s stable, lots of little bugs and issues from older XOJO builds seem to be gone. It just needs to be more responsive, and it will be truly great.
Thanks for indulging my mini rant, and hopefully we can get some positive response from the dev team that they are indeed focusing on performance.
P.S.
This is definitely an issue with larger projects. When I make a new project, or open a much smaller one, XOJO is very responsive and feels wonderful. I almost cried at how fast it was when I went to make a change to a small admin app the other day. It was sooo nice! But in larger projects, it’s back to molasses.