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From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Why do so many "great" people dislike X?
Message-ID: <1990Sep11.194518@ai.mit.edu>
Date: 11 Sep 90 23:45:18 GMT
References: <9009040108.AA21988@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> <119376@linus.mitre.org>
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Reply-To: tmb@ai.mit.edu
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Lines: 33

In article <119376@linus.mitre.org>, seg@barney.mitre.org (Scott E.
Gordon) writes:
|> 	As someone who is going to be moving to an 'X' environment
|> 	for reasons of image processing, I am *really* worried about
|> 	the imaging functions in X.  I have heard very bad things about
|> 	these functions.  Well, actually, I just heard that they were
|> 	really bad, but was not really told the reasons.  Can anyone
|> 	expound on their experiences?  

I'm not sure what you mean by "imaging functions". X lets you put up
arbitrary sets of pixels on your display, and gives you access to
colormaps,
etc. Unless you use the memory-map extensions, there is a
non-negligible
overhead associated with such operations, but even performance
over an ethernet is good enough for most applications. Finally, X also
has extensions for doing animation via multibuffering.

|> 	Also, there is a question (keeping in mind we know very little
|> 	about X right now) about whether software written in X will
|> 	work for any X peripheral.  If we have 2 different display
|> 	boards for example, do we have to have 2 different versions
|> 	of the software, or do the boards deal with the imaging calls and
|> 	(hopefully) are transparent to the user? 

X windows classifies display types according to "visuals" (e.g.,
B/W, static color, pseudo color (CLUT)). Depending on your application,
you may have to write code for different visual types, but this is
inherent in the nature of the differences between the displays.
X, in fact, probably does the best job among all windowing systems
of letting you take advantage of most of the capabilities of your
display
hardware in a portable manner.