The suite spent 88% of its step time asleep: 564 s of steps, 496 s of
them in sleep(n) - fixed spans estimated by hand and then copied from
step to step. That is why it was slow, and why it flickered.
The signal is afterFrames(count, timeout) in ui/render.ts, exposed as
__gm.afterFrames(). It wakes the loop itself, because an editor that
draws nothing would never redeem a promise of a frame, and it gives up
after a timeout instead of hanging the run. settle() in the harness
waits two drawn frames (~32 ms) instead of 150-300 ms and falls back to
sleep(150) when the hook is missing (an old build): silently not
waiting would make every later check a coin toss.
Every action goes through it now - click, doubleClick, wheel, drag,
dragAsset, press, typeText, select, mutate, undo, redo - and with that
about 550 sleep() calls behind those actions became redundant, helpers
that are nothing but a mutate in a coat included. What a frame cannot
answer got its own condition instead: waitUntil(expr), play()/stop()
waiting on __gm.state.mode rather than on 300 ms, saved() for the
autosave (the two hand-written polling loops sampled at 300 ms for
something that arrives after a second), and showTab() as a real tool -
47 places called evaluate("__gm.showTab(...)") raw, and 24 of them
waited for nothing at all and read the old panel.
564 s -> 243 s of step time, the waiting share 88% -> 76%. Three kinds
of wait were kept, and each one bit when it was taken away: loading
bytes (textures, fonts), game time that a repaint cannot stand in for
(time scale, shader and particle clocks, the live values a running
graph carries), and the inertia the scroll step measures on purpose.
Two things the new speed uncovered, both real: 25-animation read the
frame menu unfiltered and had frozen an incomplete list (the CI failure
on c990dbc), and 33-render-on-change measured idleness while the
autosave of the step before was still painting - it waits for
saveStatus to leave dirty/saving now, so it measures that nothing
happens any more instead of that it waited long enough.
The renderer is taken off the ticker; the ticker itself keeps running, so
the clock, a live world and the panels still get their step. Drawing now
happens inside a 200 ms trailing window that every pointer, wheel and key
event, every Widget.invalidate/resize, every Stack.relayout, every
EditorState.emit and both library onChange hooks reopen. The window rather
than a single frame is what makes the ~70 direct redraw() calls that never
pass through invalidate() safe, along with repaints an event only starts:
a microtask, a texture upload, a resolved font.
Editor.movesByItself() keeps asking for every frame while Play or an editor
run is on, a time shader is on screen, or the particle or animation preview
is showing.
The FPS counter now counts drawn frames over the time the renderer was
awake. Idle seconds are not slow seconds, so it answers "how smooth while
it moves" and holds its last answer instead of falling to 0 at rest.
Measured on the built stand, 20 s per variant, CPU of all chromium
processes from /proc: kept awake 75.5 % of a core at 60 fps, render on
change 8.8 % with 0 frames drawn, awake again 83.9 % as an order probe.
No colour check can see a missing repaint: pixelAt extracts from the stage
on demand and is just as green on a screen frozen a minute ago. Step 33
watches the new __gm.renderStats() counter instead.
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