On 3/20/21 2:20 AM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
We need some graphic environment. Simple fact of life is that up to now X11 was most stable environment. Namely, old 30 years old programs work as they used to work. Unfortunatly, this is not the case with newer things, my graphic code for "famework of the day" got broken in few years. And a lot of folks have similar experience.
If X11 becomes obsolete (let's say 20 years later), would you agree to include another graphic framework into our repo?
Let me add that retargetting our existing programs say to WinAPI would be rather easy (and would not require breaking X11 support), but nobody voluntereed to do the work. It seems that people prefer to work on new code, probably because in new code they can concentrate on core things and (at least at beginning ignore some system aspects and corner cases). But for long term interface it is exactly handling of system aspects and corner cases that determines viablility. Adapting tried code in very slowly evolving environment is much easier than coping with rapid breaking chages in "modern" systems.
I don't think there are many "corner cases" get improved in HyperDoc in the past 20 years? Probably because it doesn't attract many users, thus fewer developers.
Another apect is performace: our X11 programs have by current standard very small resource requirements and high performace. Browsers (and web page code) tend to get slower faster than hardware get faster so for long time we can expect bad performance.
No modern GUI toolkits can beat X11 in terms of low RAM usage. (But it can beat X11 in performance by using GPU rendering in some cases.) I would say X11 programs has its own list of disadvantages: 1. Security. (One reason it is getting replaced by wayland.) 2. Performance. Because rendering using CPU is much slower than GPU. 3. i18n. I don't think X11 libs can do truetype fonts and RTL languages? Anyway, back to original problem, I'll give X11 support on macOS another try. - Qian
BTW: Long time ago I was one of users of shared Sun workstations. There was X11 installed, but machines had only 4M of memory and X11 was quite slow on them. But I have found manuals of "suntools", clearly marked "obsolete". I peeked into manuals and tried the software. It had it quiks, but run with quite satisfactory performance. Form that time I started to appreciate advantages of "obsolete" software...
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fricas-devel/0a77c1a9-e474-9df5-af94-eb792131e910%40gmail.com.
