Re:Userdir URLs like https://example.org/~username/ are dang...
by DonHopkins on Wednesday April 08, 2020 @11:22AM
(#22813702)
X-Windows IS a dozen layers of poorly-designed abstraction, itself. To the core. Most of which nobody even uses any more. But is still required to be there. And yes, it is extremely bad for remote applications.
>XTool was very small and fast compared to the X sample server because I wrote the server from scratch. I think that I'm the only person to write an X server outside of the X Consortium. One of the things that I learned by doing it was that the X Consortium folks were wrong when they said that the documentation was the standard, not the sample server. There were significant differences between the two.
>The only really worthwhile thing about X was the distributed extension registration mechanism. All of the input, graphics and other crap should be moved to extension #1. That way, it won't be mandatory in conforming implementations once that stuff was obsolete. As you probably know, that's where we are today; nobody uses that stuff but it's like the corner of an Intel chip that implements the original instruction set. As an aside, I upset many when working on OpenDoc for Apple and saying the same thing there.
>The atom/property mechanism allows clients to allocate memory in the server that can never be freed. Some way to free memory needs to be added.
>The bit encodings should be part of a separate language binding, not part of the functional description.
>Had he done some real design work and looked at what others were doing he might have realized that at its core, X was a distributed database system in which operations on some of the databases have visual side-effects. I forget the exact number, but X includes around 20 different databases: atoms, properties, contexts, selections, keymaps, etc. each with their own set of API calls. As a result, the X API is wide and shallow like the Mac, and full of interesting race conditions to boot. The whole thing could have been done with less than a dozen API calls.
The X-Windows Disaster
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...
>X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056516
John Steinhart wrote XTool, a nice snappy reimplementation of X11 on top of SunView! ;)
https://web.archive.org/web/20171008204348/https://minnie.tu...
X and NeWS History
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15325226
Jon Steinhart wrote:
>XTool was very small and fast compared to the X sample server because I wrote the server from scratch. I think that I'm the only person to write an X server outside of the X Consortium. One of the things that I learned by doing it was that the X Consortium folks were wrong when they said that the documentation was the standard, not the sample server. There were significant differences between the two.
>The only really worthwhile thing about X was the distributed extension registration mechanism. All of the input, graphics and other crap should be moved to extension #1. That way, it won't be mandatory in conforming implementations once that stuff was obsolete. As you probably know, that's where we are today; nobody uses that stuff but it's like the corner of an Intel chip that implements the original instruction set. As an aside, I upset many when working on OpenDoc for Apple and saying the same thing there.
>The atom/property mechanism allows clients to allocate memory in the server that can never be freed. Some way to free memory needs to be added.
>The bit encodings should be part of a separate language binding, not part of the functional description.
>Had he done some real design work and looked at what others were doing he might have realized that at its core, X was a distributed database system in which operations on some of the databases have visual side-effects. I forget the exact number, but X includes around 20 different databases: atoms, properties, contexts, selections, keymaps, etc. each with their own set of API calls. As a result, the X API is wide and shallow like the Mac, and full of interesting race conditions to boot. The whole thing could have been done with less than a dozen API calls.