Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 06:46:53 UTC, Tyler Jameson 
Little wrote:
> I'm in the opposite camp. The server is never going to be able 
> to support everything, and people are just going to fall back 
> to rendering themselves anyway.

Couldn't you make the same argument against any gui library? But 
there's a lot of stuff in common that might be sped up. Menus are 
very slow on Qt over remote X11 (at least with the default 
theme). Ironically though, the tabbed widgets are pretty fast, 
aside from a somewhat slow startup.

But menus are pretty much the same for any application, so that'd 
be a good thing to put in the display library.

Of course, you do want just "blit this image" as a generic 
fallback, and we can do better than X too, by just making it use 
png+jpg or something. Boom, transparency (yes, X has this in the 
render extension) and some big compression boosts.

Add display side scaling, perhaps make the pixmap be implemented 
as an opengl texture so you can scale, rotate, quickly paint, 
etc., and that's pretty useful for a lot of things. But I don't 
think it replaces the usefulness of higher level concepts like 
menus, buttons, etc. Sure, the app might have to customize them, 
but do they have to customize *all* of them?





> You may find this interesting: 
> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/03/1219239/remote-desktop-backend-merged-into-wayland

hmm, indeed.

> I would love attach/reattach for UIs. This seems like it would 
> have to be supported at the protocol level.

Yeah, and probably a middle man of some sort too so each 
application doesn't have to be listening on a port. But with the 
client state, if it can just send that back to the new 
connection, it shouldn't be too hard.