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From: jensen@winery.DEC.COM.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: re: new Xtool distrib, and Xmh in particular
Message-ID: <8703260052.AA15819@decwrl.dec.com>
Date: Wed, 25-Mar-87 19:15:41 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.8703260052.AA15819
Posted: Wed Mar 25 19:15:41 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Mar-87 03:59:41 EST
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I am in the process of implementing a complex application based on
Xtoolkit.  I have not observed the performance degradation you
mention.  The additional overhead in basic event dispatching
is negligable: I have timed mouse dragging routines using bare X
and Xt and found the differences too small to notice.

It is true that certain parts of Xt (the Resource Manager in
particular) could be implemented more efficiently, but this
tends to affect startup time more than run-time.  Given that
Xt is somewhat of a prototype (in the sense that X10 was a
prototype), it is not too surprising that not all of the
code is tight.  There are also places where additional code
had to be written to simulate X11 functionality not available
under X10.

The fact that an application based on Xt is slow does not
necessarily imply that Xt is the problem; it could be other
parts of the application unrelated to the display code.

In conclusion, I have found Xt to be extremely useful for the
particular application I am writing.  The library of Widgets
saves me from re-inventing several wheels.  More importantly,
the Widget abstraction makes the code much easier to
read, since I can "hide" the graphics specific code (which
tends to be ratty) inside widget-private data & routines.
Other facilities such as Context & Resource management are
useful by themselves.  Writing code for Xt is a big improvement
over bare X.  If my experience is typical, reports of Xt's
demise are highly exaggerated.

				/Paul Jensen
				 Digital Equipment Corp
				 Western Area Operations
				 Santa Clara, CA


any opinions expressed above are solely my own, etc...