Re: About our effort at NoMachine

On Wednesday 26 March 2003 06:45 pm, Alan Cox wrote:
> > 6) enough extensions get loaded, with typically at least 2 round trips
> > at least to get each going, and maybe 4-5 extensions used
> > by the applications (toolkits). We need an extension extension to avoid
> > these round trips, (one could just kludge around with a batching call;
> > but there are other shortcomings with the extension system,
> > like the lack of extension versioning in the framework) that I think
> > it is wise to think about a better framework).
>
> What I would love to see in X11 is conditional streams. When you throw
> a command at a shell for example you can say
>
> 	"Do X, Y, Z , ... "
>
> but also
>
> 	Do X, Y, Z, ..."
>
> and bracketed sets of these
>
> 	Do  (Do X, Y, Z stopping on fail)  (Do A, B, C stopping on fail)
>
> but stop on a failure. That gives you the ability to do more than just
> batching, since you can batch a sequence of commands for the general
> case and respond to the failure. My gut feeling (and I've not been
> doing analysis unlike you folks) is that this would improve things
> immensely for startup

IMHO this would only help in a reduced set of cases, like the
one pointed by Jim. The "granularity" of X protocol doesn't allow
many of such optimizations and I guess this would increase the
complexity of X server implementation significantly.

>
> > 7) image transport is a real issue, whether for glyphs or other images.
> > This is in part due to image sizes having grown due to greater depth
> > (most people have 32 bits/pixel these days). So besides compressing
> > glyphs, having the window system able to better
> > take images in pretty native formats would be a serious win for alot of
> > applications.
>
> It is also due to the inability to do long term caching of images in
> the server/on disk _between_ server runs on low bandwidth links

NX does cross-session persistence of image caches. This is one
of the reasons of speed noted by some. What do you mean when
you say this is not possible?

/Gian Filippo.