3 ms·
> even if you count ncurses, the tty stuff is way, way lighter than all the rendering code, componentry, and hierarchical dispatch stuff that goes into a typica
by zokier 2y ago
> even if you count ncurses, the tty stuff is way, way lighter than all the rendering code, componentry, and hierarchical dispatch stuff that goes into a typical GUI toolkit
But using tty/ncurses does not avoid the costs of GUI, your terminal emulator will still need to have that. So using terminal can only add additional cost, not reduce it.
- bitwize 2y agoThe costs of, say, xterm (or even konsole) + tty layer are still far less than the costs of the UI layer for a halfway decent IDE. It's a bit penny-wise and pound-foolish to worry about the added cost of the tty layer when the "talking directly to the display server" approach incurs so much more cost, unless you were willing to accept an unusably minimal user interface (worse than any terminal program would be). Remember, Unix systems implemented tty support in perhaps tens of kilobytes of memory, on CPUs running at single-digit megahertz speeds. Graphical IDEs these days are often frickin' Electron apps.
- zokier 2y ago> when the "talking directly to the display server" approach incurs so much more cost, unless you were willing to accept an unusably minimal user interface (worse than any terminal program would be). Talking directly to display server simply can not incur more cost than having terminal application and then terminal emulator talking to display server; the talking to display server is something you need anyways, and anything else (like having a tty layer) is just additional cost on top of that.