menu with lots of options slows down keyboard entry into textbox

[bjarthur]

on M2 apple silicon, a Menu with lots (say 10k) options slows down entering characters into a Textbox, but only on WGLMakie, not GLMakie. like this:

using WGLMakie
        
f = Figure()
Textbox(f[1,1], placeholder="type quickly")
Menu(f[2,1], options = string.(1:10_000))

if you type quickly enough and length(options) is large enough, the characters will appear out of order in the textbox.

i'll agree with anyone who says a menu with 10k options is a bad UI, but still, why the performance problems in WGLMakie but not GLMakie?

[SimonDanisch]

Because WGLMakie is a lot slower than GLMakie ;)
Rendering speed should be somewhat comparable, but any event/update must travel quite far for WGLMakie and I expect doing anything with the menu to trigger quite a lot of events.

[bjarthur]

but just entering text into the box shouldn't trigger any menu related events. so why does just having the menu there with lots of options slow the textbox down?

[ffreyer]

This is more or less caused by layouting. Typing in the Textbox resizes it. Without setting tellwidth and tellheight to false, the resize propagates to the Menu block and then every plot inside. Allocations confirm this:

Writing "1" to an empty Textbox with your example code:

• both true (default): 6.4M allocs
• one true, one false: 2.6M allocs
• both false: 5.6k allocs

code

begin
    using WGLMakie

    f = Figure()
    Textbox(f[1,1], placeholder="type quickly", tellwidth = false, tellheight = false)
    Menu(f[2,1], options = string.(1:10_000), tellwidth = false, tellheight = false)
    f
end

begin
    str = "1"
    ks = map(collect(str)) do letter
        key = if letter == ' '
            Keyboard.space
        elseif letter == '.'
            Keyboard.period
        elseif isnumeric(letter)
            eval(:(Keyboard.$(Symbol(lowercase("_$letter")))))
        else
            eval(:(Keyboard.$(Symbol(lowercase(letter)))))
        end
    end

    @time begin
        events(f).mouseposition[] = (300, 250)
        events(f).mousebutton[] = Makie.MouseButtonEvent(Mouse.left, Mouse.press)
        events(f).mousebutton[] = Makie.MouseButtonEvent(Mouse.left, Mouse.release)

        for (letter, key) in zip(str, ks)
            events(f).keyboardbutton[] = Makie.KeyEvent(key, Keyboard.press)
            events(f).unicode_input[] = letter
            events(f).keyboardbutton[] = Makie.KeyEvent(key, Keyboard.release)
        end
    end
end