RE: Snappy GUI response

"Sottek, Matthew J" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.xfree86.forum
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I have to agree with David. Yes, Alan is correct, that X has a tight
protocol
and was implemented when every clock counted. However, X was also
implemented
when it was reasonable to draw an interface using rectangles and stipple
patterns.

Mark said:
>  This is because people writing X applications (and particularly 
>X toolkits) have little understanding of graphics performance issues
>in the X-Window system.

But you could just as reasonably state that X's design seems to have little
understanding of how a modern GUI is drawn. With every passing generation
you move from a "rendered" GUI (Where an acceleration engine creates the
data from commands like "draw rectangle") to a composted GUI (where the
acceleration engine just assembles rich media)

The GUI is moving in that direction because that is what it takes to create
high quality desktops, regardless of the limitations of X11.

Clearly there is more to the story than "X isn't designed for modern 
applications". If you gave up your protocol today and made a completely
direct rendered X server and ended up with really snappy performance, you
may end up wishing you had the protocol back in a few more years when
everyone's display is again disconnected from the host machine.

-Matt


-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Cox [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 1:49 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [forum] Snappy GUI response


> IMO, a bigger contributing factor is that the X design does not have
> application performance as its number one objective, and the resulting

Wrong. When X was designed every clock counted. 8Mhz was "elite cool
workstation to fight over"
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