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From: mrose@cheetah.ca.psi.COM (Marshall Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Macintosh vs. X windows
Message-ID: <20128.665081786@cheetah.ca.psi.com>
Date: 28 Jan 91 16:56:26 GMT
References: <930@borg.cs.unc.edu>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: xpert@expo.lcs.mit.edu
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 27

Well, I'm neither in the X nor Mac mainstream, but I've done a bit of
programming in both.

In my perspective, the key advantage of X is that it allows you to
decouple the display engine from the compute engine.  It turns out that
this allows you to get a lot more leverage out of your software, just
like putting up an NFS server let's you ge a lot more leverage out of
your disk investment.

Also in my perspective, the key advantage of the Mac windowing system is
that the look-and-feel is superb.  X is so-called policy-free, and
whilst this is an appropriate design goal if you are trying to provide
windowing building blocks, it makes it a lot harder when you want to put
together a finished product.

Of course, there are other advantages to both.

In terms of programming complexity, I find them about equally hard,
although I've programmed UNIX a lot longer than I've programmed a Mac.
Neither is simple.

Now, finally in my opinion, the best of all worlds would be to get
someone to right a Mac emulator or something for X.  However, given the
legal posturing of the industry these days, I'm sure that this would
result in many billable hours being racked up.

/mtr