On Mon, Jun 30, 2003, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote about "Re: [Jog Offer] SGI is looking for a Xwindows hacker":
I too used to hear horror stories about Xlib, now that I had a geuine encounter with it myself, I can tell you that everything you heared is completly true :-)
XLib documentation is a great material to read if you're in the toilet - I can attest that ;)
Wow, Xlib is certainly getting a bad rep here ;)
Xlib (and the X11 protocol in general) is not as bad, boring, or hard as you might think. X11 was an amazingly advanced and interesting paradigm for its time (the 80s). Except for a few issues the current protocols (and ICCCM) failed to catch-up on, like fonts printing and sound, X11 is still a very good framework, and it is a damn shame that people that failed to understand it decided to work around it with unnecessary bloated replacements (like CORBA, etc.).
hm... I must have been misunderstood. I did not say that Xlib and X Windows are bad, boring, bloated etc. In fact, I think they are a majestic piece of software engineering, as shown by the fact that it is still useful and alive some 20+ years after it has beign concived.
What I meant is that that it's built to allow so *much* functionality and flexability that it's not trivial at all to understand, at least to understand to the point where one can debug crashes on a port of XFree to a new system as opposed to writing some GUI app.
This is, however, not a bad thing.
I'm more saddened by the fact that there hasn't been much progress since X11R4 which came out a decade ago. Well, there have been a few areas of progress (like the X keyboard extension, which is a real mess but basically works and beats the original protocol) but most problems that annoyed me a decade ago (like the lack of a printing "protocol" in the ICCCM) still remain.
On the other hand the original X concept is so flexible that it supporets natively concpets that required other windowing environment years to get (network transparncy) or never got at all (endianess transparncy).
It still sucks that there's no support for printing, although if someone claimed that a Windowing system and a printer infrastructure aren't REALLY connected and only seem so on the surfarce I'll be willing to listen although not sure I'd agree in the end :-)
Cheers, Gilad
Note that X-Windows' speed was never a problem for me 10 years ago, and certainly isn't one now. Speed is only a problem for gaming (and there are
workarounds for that) and when bloated widget frameworks (I shall not name
names :)) take over your machine.
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