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From: dac@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Daniel Christian)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals
Message-ID: <4424@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 7 Mar 89 00:59:36 GMT
References: <8903011944.AA04616@torel.uit.no>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 35


  I agree with the Visual folks when they say that we need to look at
how we write X applications.  I do not beleive that virtual memory
should be required for day-to-day applications (which in my book is
almost everything except serious CAD type work).  It is not
unreasonable to have limits in the server and keep these limits in mind
when designing applications.  All personal computer applications have
dealt with limits like these very effectively.

  Applications need to be efficient.  Inefficiency unnecessarily
strains the server and slows down the system.  Toolkits were
originally billed as being more efficient than simple Xlib code.  Is
this really true?  What more can be done?

  From doing some server development, I noticed that toolkit
applications imeadiately store one or more images to the server.  As
far as I can tell, these images are not use except maybe as border
stipple.  I haven't dug into the toolkit code enought to know what it
is trying to do.

  There are a large number of people out there who would like to use
their current PC/Mac/Amiga/etc as an (cheap) X server.  The installed
base of these machines absolutely dwarfs the workstation market: Do
not ignore them.  Many people will wonder why a machine that currenly
runs a huge number of complete graphics applications is suddenly too
small to handle just the graphics side of X applications.

  On a similar note, why are toolkit applications so @#$%&#!@# Large?!
The baseline seems to be about 240K on a Sun3 (Xlogo).  xfd is 100K
smaller and does more.  Do things get smaller with C++ tookits?

-Dan Christian
dac@ri.cmu.edu

All disclaimers apply.
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