Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!dent.Berkeley.EDU!davidh From: davidh@dent.Berkeley.EDU (David S. Harrison) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: Is SUN a "PURE PLAYER" in window systems - SunView or OpenWindows??? Keywords: X, NeWS, Toolkits Message-ID: <20972@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 2 Jan 90 19:04:37 GMT References: <18YA-8xds13@ficc.uu.net> <8912302010.AA11723@super.super.org> <20966@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: davidh@dent.Berkeley.EDU (David S. Harrison) Lines: 32 In article <18YA-8xds13@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: > Perhaps. Does this happen in practice, though? I think we can all agree > that it does happen in X. And X doesn't even have the option of sharing > resources when they're desirable... sure, you can use shared libraries, > but that doesn't help when you're dealing with multiple machines. This > is a networked window system, after all. > > And X doesn't leave a channel for the user to install enhanced gadgets, > except by at least relinking all their programs. Most of the NeWS applications I have seen posted here download their own UI code into the server without even expecting any other application will use these features. I remain adamant that the problem can only be solved by the adoption of a common toolkit that all application writers can link against. Work in this area is moving much faster under X than under NeWS. In any case, I expect the underlying system will not be very important once a dominant toolkit (like Motif) becomes commonplace. It is true that NeWS has a slight memory advantage if a user uses several applications each running on a different machine. However, due to the use of shared libraries, the savings is proportional to the number of machines not the number of applications and is thus reasonably small. With an appropriate implementation of shared libraries, it may even be possible to install enhanced gadgets without relinking (since some runtime binding is required to implement shared libraries). All in all, the differences are minor. David Harrison UC Berkeley Electronics Research Lab (davidh@ic.Berkeley.EDU, ...!ucbvax!ucbcad!davidh)