I will note that devdraw has been ported to run on top of X (http://plan9.us), and X has been ported to run on top of devdraw (equis by fgb).
(Devdraw has also been ported to win32 as part of drawterm and inferno, and as part of a GSoC project to port 9vx to windows.) So if somebody wanted to build a new window system, that IMHO seems like a natural starting point. uriel On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 5:58 PM, David Tweed<david.tw...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Kurt H Maier<karmaf...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Anselm R Garbe<garb...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> a) on top of existing ones >>> >>> b) existing ones on top >>> >>> I tend to a) atm just because it would make porting to other platforms >>> so much simpler. >> >> There is no point to running a window system on top of an existing >> window system, unless there is some religious abstraction method >> you're married to. Implementing a gui that runs on a gui ends up with >> crap like WINE. I can understand arguments that x11 needs to be >> replaced, and I can understand (some) arguments that x11 needs to be >> left alone, but the idea that x11 needs to be *supplemented* is >> amazing. > > The advantage of running something on top of X during development is > that users can experiment with it whilst still being able to run their > existing applications, thus getting hopefully some people interested > in doing development because they like using what's currently there. > Otherwise, you end up with something like Berlin, the Y windowing > system, the "full" display-postscript compositing engine behind "full" > GNUstep and all those other "new" windowing systems that never > actually got anywhere near completion because the only thing one could > do with them in their current state was development. > > (Before anyone asks, I'm unlikely to get involved in developing a new > windowing system precisely because I suspect that it would be very > difficult to defy the historical patter that a lot of code would be > written but development would stall before a day-in-day-out usable > system would be completed. Mind you, I'm weird in that I tend to > prefer existing software that I can use to eulogising about how in > principle there's this great way of doing things but whose current > incarnation doesn't have any way of acheiving the tasks I want to use > my computer for today ;-) ) > > -- > cheers, dave tweed__________________________ > computer vision reasearcher: david.tw...@gmail.com > "while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." -- > attempted insult seen on slashdot > >
