[armitron]

This has been a point of contention for lots of people, including myself. From what I remember, it was supposed to happen for Pharo 7 but now I see that it didn't.

Squeak and Pharo are great but the font rendering is terrible, I can't stress how bad it looks on hidpi screens. That makes it unusable for me since it gives me headaches. It's a shame too since they have spent a lot of time working on related frameworks (athens?, brick?, bloc?) that alas don't seem to go anywhere (or nobody is in the position to bring everything together). Last I checked they were trying to use a native library from Mozilla (Moz2D which is the backend of Firefox!?!?) to do all rendering, which is highly problematic and disappointing if it ends up being used. The clusterfuck of libraries that they have layered together should clearly point out that this is not the right approach.

On macOS, the graphics stack looks like: CoreGraphics <- Skia <- Moz2D <- Sparta <- Bloc <- Brick

Alan Kay would have a seizure. Aliaksei Syrel: What happened to keeping things simple?

I really hope the graphics issues get resolved since I'm pretty sure they are costing them a lot of users. The regular Pharo devs by virtue of using Pharo every day are (probably) not in the position to realize how a new user coming from environments with great font rendering, UI speed/smoothness, reacts to Pharo. Initial impressions are everything.

[scroot]

I agree that the appearance of the system in this regard probably turns off lots of users. There are some in the Pharo community who are quite aware of this fact, but there are simply not enough contributors at the moment to deal with it on their own.

I am more hopeful about Bloc, however. The stack is not any more insane than that of a web browser.

[atemerev]

The entire subsystems were rewritten from scratch, there are huge lengths of deprecated and/or poorly documented code, however, this hidpi bug remains unfixed for 5 years or more.

This is not about having too few contributors; this is about different priorities. This is why Pharo remains an obscure project on the margins of the industry, despite all its potential.

[zestyping]

I haven't evaluated the appearance of text in Pharo, but I agree with the importance of the issue. Poor text rendering in any application or environment would be an immediate dealbreaker for me.