Re: xfree will be the best....

Around 14 o'clock on Apr 5, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> Last I checked Xrender was an extension to the core renderer to speed up
> operations not well handled in the core, but did not replace many common
> operations the core handles just fine.

Render may be just an extension, but it does provide a complete 
replacement rendering model.  When reasonably accelerated, there should be 
no reason to ever use the core rendering requests again.  The Plan-9 
window system has been running for a long time with the same rendering 
model.

The only functionality currently missing from the extension is some kind 
of image transport mechanism to replace PutImage.  The semantics of that 
operation are easy enough to specify in terms of the fundemental Render 
primitive, but there are questions about image encoding and precisely how 
to pass all of the existing picture parameters that no-one has spent the 
necessary time to figure out. 

I hope to have a chance to look at this sometime soon; application
performance over networks would greatly benefit from more efficient image
encodings than are now available.

-keith