[Xorg] Server side widgets

[Roland Mainz]

Ely Levy wrote:
> > > latly I saw quite a few flame wars about server side widgets,
> > > People from projects like y-windows and onyx claim for performance
> > > improvments and nicer cleaner implementations,
> > > as well as that X doesn't support it from the plain reason it is old.
> > > I got the impression it was a design descision, which lead to many
> > > diffrent tool kits.
> > >
> > > My question is, why did X chose not to use server side widgets (if it was
> > > ever concidered)?
> >
> > Well, you will need something like a server-side language to get the
> > widgets working. DPS(=Display PostScript) was capable to do server-side
> > widgets - but somehow DPS was lost deep in hell.
> > Today such a project will likely "die" in the flamewar "which language
> > should be used: JAVA, Perl, PostScript, TCL, bash(ouch!) etc. ..." ...
> > =:-)
> I think ywindows onyx persco just used simple c/c++?

Think about remote X11: Client is a Cray SV1 (vector machine), server is
Xorg server on Linux/x86... how to you want to run the C++ code of a
Cray in the Xserver ? :)

> What the advantage of bytecode?

Having a platform-independent, low-level language and a way to run a
scheduler to allow fair CPU usage by all widgets regardless how the
widget code was designed/written.

[snip]
> Write them well?:)
> actually i saw it happen in client side as well, making certain
> clients go berserk and take all CPU,
> so there isn't much diffrance IMOH.

Sure, but there is always the way to "kill -9 ${pid_of_berserk_client}".
You really do not want to kill the whole server just because one client
got rabies.

----

Bye,
Roland

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