Re: Snappy GUI response

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 01:07:25PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: 
> 
>>  I see alot of people saying "things would be fast if we only
>>had this, or that", but I know that's not going to change anything.
>>Direct rendered 2D doesn't solve the event problem.  I'm pretty
>>convinced that the synchronization issues will make it worse.
> 
> There's no chance of application developers as a general class ever
> understanding X protocol or X architecture on any kind of detailed
> level; and I'm talking about just things like setting back pixmaps,
> exposes, etc. 

Think about how much simpler the rendering pipeline would be without 
expose events. Pretty much all toolkits are built around an asynchronous 
way of drawing in response to an expose event, which basically is 
synonymous with client - server roundtrips. When fresh programmers 
starts out writing GUI applications, the asynchronous rendering concept 
is the hardest for them to master.

If there were no expose event, the entire windowing system would be 
simpler. Of course this would involve 100% backing store and save under 
support, but it's doable on modern hardware.