3 ms·
One interesting thing about the XView toolkit: it built the entire UI out of fonts (bitmap fonts at the time). It supposedly allowed faster rendering because th
by mhalle 4y ago
One interesting thing about the XView toolkit: it built the entire UI out of fonts (bitmap fonts at the time). It supposedly allowed faster rendering because the fonts were loaded and were server side.
I actually used the low layer display layer under XView for some UI projects. Worked great!
While I'm here, the other nice thing about programming in SunView (and later XView) was the use of varargs call patterns to build UI elements. Early X development, as I recall, was significantly more verbose than the Sun equivalent, though probably more type safe. The *View APIs felt a little more like today's high level languages.
- neilv 4y agoI loved the SunView and XView elegant use of varargs for properties. GTK+ seemed a bit like that, but got more complicated. Sun also had a nice add-on graphics library for XView called Slingshot. It might have my first-ever open source contribution (just a bug fix).
- jhbadger 4y agoI really liked the XView toolkit. For a while it had a second life on Linux after Sun dropped it as it later was released as open source. But it had a lot of things in it that assumed a 32-bit system and so basically died when everyone went to 64-bit. In theory it could be patched, but I don't think anyone cares enough about it to do that these days.
- kragen 4y agoI think a few people claim to have done it, for example https://github.com/ggodd/xview-64bit https://github.com/ggodd/xview-64bit.