Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:35207 comp.sys.amiga.tech:5570 comp.windows.x:10761 comp.graphics:6110 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!amiga!boing!dale From: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech,comp.windows.x,comp.graphics Subject: Re: Request for testers for Color X11 for Amiga Message-ID: <793@boing.UUCP> Date: 11 Jun 89 10:28:21 GMT References: <788@boing.UUCP> <566@bnr-fos.UUCP> Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) Organization: Boing, Milpitas, Ca. Lines: 132 In article <566@bnr-fos.UUCP> protcoop@bnr-public.UUCP (Joel Avery) writes: > >I hope that X11 does not represent the future of the Amiga windowing >environment ... please Mr. Luck, tell me it is not so. I like choices... The X Window System represents a what may become the accepted interface to programs on most if not all engineering and possibly all professional workstations in the future. The Amiga needs to be able to play ball with all the other players in this industry, whether it be via networks, compatible file formats, or just making the names of similar commands the same. makedir or mkdir? They do the same thing. X Window System brings alot to the Amiga Party. There is alot that the Amiga Window system can learn from X and vice versa. You should see the source to X, it could use a dose of amiga software technology itself. The concept of a network transparent graphics/window system is very appealing to most people. It allows for better distribution of resources. We can take advantage of the particular advantages of hardware and software. The Amiga is great at graphics. She lacks a bit in the database and number crunching field (compared to a Cray). Even more so she lacks in available applications running on her...... X Windows helps provide that. There are many applications CAD/CAM, DTP, CASE, etc. that are being written/ported specifically for/to the X Window system. With X11 on the Amiga we get to take advantage of these programs in a networked environment. If the Amiga does a good job of presenting the program to the user maybe the writer of the application would be convinced to actually make it available native on the Amiga. Under X11 the graphics calls are perfectly transportable. All the programmer needs to worry about is the specific os differences, like file io, etc. The Amiga user interface=== Intuition was designed to allow the application programmer total freedom in the design of their user interface. On the Amiga, the user interface system is actually two parts... Intuition AND Workbench. Intuition has no idea what an ICON is yet it is very important part of the UIMS. The Amiga has one. The X Window system has at last count (I think) at least 6 choices of UIMS. Offering nearly the ultimate in choices of pop up/pull down, tiled/overlapped, etc. User Interface options. Because there is such an effort to make applications work with any UIMS the end user can very likely be assured that the applications they run on their machine will actually act similar to other applications under their choice of UIMS. Enough of theory and some of the reasons why I chose to bring X11 out for the Amiga Computer. > 3 meg of >memory needed !? It is not good to jump to conclusions about required testing environments and minimal environments. Even your 512k ram amiga is really a 3/4m machine. 256k of rom are installed. The X Window system shares some concepts of the Amiga however the implementations do not always coincide. This means duplicated code. For example the Amiga struct Rect is { (xul,yul), (xlr,ylr) }, where as the X Window rect is { xul,yul, width,height }. So there are many area where I wish we could make use of the optimized Amiga routines, but am unable to do so. I'm very happy that we can coexist in a separate screen like any other application that may use a separate screen. Also the three meg is an estimate assuming a NUMBER of concurrent running Amiga X tasks. as well just plain amiga programs running as well. > 7 meg of mass storage!? Again a 7 megs is for testing. We have nearly 2 megs of fonts!!!! Maybe you should check out what the X Window system entails before complaining about the resource requirements. Have you checked out your local desk top publishing packages for the Amiga. How many megabytes do they need for their fonts? We have not stated using shared libraries for the Xlib nor the X toolkits yet. There are several problems that need to be overcome with the integration of a socket library, standard c library into a shared/reentrant environment. The Amiga shared libraries are a needed thing and it is completely in the plans to supply this to X program on the Amiga. > One of the things I brag >to people here at work about is that while they run Un*x and >X-windows in a 8meg/40meg environment, they often run out of memory >when multitasking. At home on my Amiga with 512k and 2 floppies, >I can do much better, plus my windows are much faster. When I had >1.5 meg of memory, I could just scream with all kinds of stuff running. The Amiga graphics/layers windowing system is a very sophisticated and targeted environment. It was designed to speed graphics on programs living on the machine as well as provided special functions because of the special capabilities of the Amiga chip set. The os style funtions are very limited and provide only a subset of what most Unix programmers are used to without talking directly to devices/hardware. When programmers are not seperated from the hardware but a veneer of software for resource control they can write much more streamlined code, however all of the resource control must be done by the application instead of the system, which makes it HARDER to write well behaved applications. I wonder exactly what kinds of programs you are comparing between the Amiga and the Unix environment. There are so many factors I think you are missing that might temper your arguments. Most of those unix machines habe probably 4 (four) times the amount of display bits to update in the same amount of time. Most machines that I know of have not incorporated real blitters yet. Many are still languishing in the archaic cpu does all the work mentality. It turns out that the X window system has many similar concepts as the Amiga graphics/layers/intuition. Trust me. I know ;-) I was there. >If the Amiga were to use X11, sure it would be 'standard', but oh >what a hog it would be. I, for one, would be sure to drop her. So you are ready to pass judgment already? Seems a little premature. Usually decisions are made on a cost/benefit analysis. I'm not sure you are aware of the total benefits of the X Window System for the Amiga, nor am I sure you know what the costs are either. >Please, oh please tell me this cannot be so. The future of the Amiga Windowing environment? I believe in inventing technology/concepts when necessary. However when available technology is available for the asking, then I can only say lets use it and build on it. >Alan W. McKay | My opinions are mine, yours are yours. | Eat Food | -- Dale Luck GfxBase/Boing, Inc. {uunet!cbmvax|pyramid}!amiga!boing!dale