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From: fgreco@govt.shearson.COM (Frank Greco)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Macintosh vs. X windows
Message-ID: <9101281627.AA09545@fis1.shearson.com>
Date: 28 Jan 91 16:27:04 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30

> 
> I hesitate to ask this.  Given a choice between developing for a
> Macintosh and developing for X windows, why would anybody choose X?  I
> know nothing about the Mac toolbox, but I've been reading the O'Reilly
> manuals on Xlib, Xt and Xview.

	On one hand I agree with you.  X is overly complex.  That's
	what happens when 1000 pgmrs work on the same project.  I 
	thought it was a well known tenet that the best software
	is written by a small set of programmers.

	However on the other hand, unlike the Macintosh *proprietary* 
	approach, X was designed to be policy-free and only specified the
	mechanisms.  Also, portability among different machines, operating
	systems and even networking protocols was a design choice that
	the Mac ignores (probably more of a business decision than a technical one).
	If you specify policy in the window system, you probably
	can get away with less code in your toolkit and less complexity,
	but you lose the portability that allows a client pgm that was 
	developed on a Sun to be executed on a Cray and connected 
	to an X server on, say a Macintosh.

	Its a tradeoff.  I'm not a big fan of the complexity of X
	but lets be fair here.  
	
	Besides I'd say comparing the Mac toolbox to X is a bit unrealistic.
	Let's see how easy the new Mac System 7.0 API is first.


	Frank G.