Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 06:03:35PM +0200, Wyatt wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 14:50:43 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> >
> >Sure, but X forwarding is still laggy, as you pointed out.
> >
> I think that's only because it's a naive, uncompressed
> implementation.  Proper protocol compression pretty much removes
> that for most use cases.
[...]

I've run X11 forwarding over a compressed SSH tunnel before. It's
actually usable. Not fast, but usable. (And this was over the internet,
not in a LAN, which would be significantly faster.) I used to run X11
forwarding over an uncompressed channel, and it was unusably slow.

X11 was really designed for server + many workstations LAN setups, and
it still works pretty well in those scenarios. It was never designed to
be used over WANs, so it performs poorly when your link goes through the
internet. It also wasn't designed for desktop apps, though modern X
servers bypass most of the performance overhead by extensions that allow
direct memory mapping between the server and client, so you could, e.g.,
directly access VRAM once it's negotiated with the server.


T

-- 
In theory, software is implemented according to the design that has been
carefully worked out beforehand. In practice, design documents are
written after the fact to describe the sorry mess that has gone on
before.