Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!husc6!cmcl2!arizona!mike
From: mike@arizona.edu (Mike Coffin)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Why I'm suspicious of NeWS
Message-ID: <3835@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 88 20:59:53 GMT
References: <1677@desint.UUCP>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 36

From article <1677@desint.UUCP>, by geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning):
> All the NeWS proponents seem to think that its biggest feature, in fact
> the only one that "clearly" makes it better than the alternatives like
> X, is its programmability.  Well, I'm not convinced.  In fact, I think
> the programmability is NeWS's biggest drawback.  (It's second biggest
> is its capitalization, which gives me finger cramps. :-)
  ...
> 	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@ITcorp.com   {uunet,trwrb}!desint!geoff

I agree with you about the capitalization.  Was it Knuth that started
this trend with TeX?  Arrrrrggghh.

I'm a proponent of NeWS --- or at least the design of NeWS, since I've
never actually used it.  I don't think programmability  itself is
NeWS's biggest feature.  The important thing is that the designers of
NeWS realize that the most important constraint on speed in a network
window system is bandwidth.  And they further noticed that the way
to push a lot of information through a very narrow pipe is to send a
program.  I suspect that the reason NeWS will win over X --- if it
does --- is that NeWS applications will use less bandwidth than
equivalent X programs.  Not just a little less, but orders of
magnitude less.  You can effectively move the inner loop of an
interactive program from the machine where the (perhaps
computation-intensive) program is running to the machine where the
interaction is taking place.

Even if the program is running on the same machine as the server, a
bottleneck still exists; IPC between client and server requires
expensive context switches.  Presumably context switches within the
lightweight processes in the NeWS server are much cheaper than
UNIX-style context switches.
-- 

Mike Coffin				mike@arizona.edu
Univ. of Ariz. Dept. of Comp. Sci.	{allegra,cmcl2,ihnp4}!arizona!mike
Tucson, AZ  85721			(602)621-4252