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This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. Worse is better, and whoever ships a working prototype is best. Sacrificing network transparency for l
by mahmud 16y ago
This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways.
Worse is better, and whoever ships a working prototype is best.
Sacrificing network transparency for local performance should be a no-brainer, given the use-cases.
- FooBarWidget 16y agoThe bottleneck in X has never been network transparency. Local access has been accelerated through Unix domain sockets and shared memory for as long as I can remember. It looks like Wayland also has a client/server architecture which makes me suspect it's can be made network transparent just like X is.
- loewenskind 16y agoIt does make for a ridiculous API though. No one writes X for this reason, but I suspect it would speed things up a lot if everyone writing for the platform didn't have to go through multiple layers of better APIs to talk to the actual display subsystem.
- sedachv 16y agoWhat is the "X API"? Are you talking about Xlib? XCB? The protocol? Does this critique include XRender? There's really two parts to modern X programming: the window and event stuff, and XRender. The window and event system isn't bad, and it's fully asynchronous, which is a really big deal. XRender obviously can't be used for drawing by hand (that's why you have Cairo), but it's a really good design for a drawing protocol that supports a lot of possibilities for hardware acceleration.
- FooBarWidget 16y agoWhat API? There is no API, there's a protocol. Switching from TCP sockets to Unix domain sockets requires changing about 3-4 lines of connect code, but everything else remains the same. You get a lot of localhost performance for free with almost no changes.