[rescue] NeWS (was: FS/FTGH: Sun kit)

[der Mouse]

> OK, for all of you who have jumped all over me in this thread, please
> go back and carefully read what I have been saying.  Nowhere have I
> promoted X11 or Xt or anything else as a beautiful interface.

True; I think the closest you've come to defending X was to say that
you had yet to see a criticism of X that wasn't "myopic in scope".

>> I'm not sure whether I'm bragging or complaining when I say this,
>> but, I have.  As I sit here and look at my X screen, every client -
>> every last one of them - is my own code, written directly atop Xlib.
> Are you literally calling raw Xlib functions in every client, or did
> you evolve to the point where you had your own layers of
> functionality on top of Xlib?

So far, each client calls Xlib directly.  I'm beginning to think I may
have enough experience with what I usually want to try designing
something akin to a widget library, but so far, each client stands on
its own.  (Of course, the more complicated ones tend to create their
own idiosyncratic layer atop Xlib, but I'm not counting such things
because they're always, well, idiosyncratic - specific to that
particular client program.)

> SGI had their own proprietary window system before they moved to NeWS
> and then to X.

I recall when SGI switched from X layered atop GL to GL layered atop X.
It broke a game I'd written.  (The game used GL timers to drive
everything, and when the UI was relayered, something interacted with
something else in a way that made the whole game oscillate at about
.2Hz, speeding up and slowing down every few seconds.  It became
completely unplayable.  These days I play that game on Suns with cg6
framebuffers; it talks directly to the framebuffer, taking advantage of
its line-draw capability to pretend it's running on a vector display.
I built a shim layer that provided just barely enough of the GL
interface that I didn't have to rewrite the game - it used only a tiny
fraction of the power GL provided.)

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