3D X

[Russell Shaw]

Matthias Hopf wrote:
> On Apr 02, 06 18:09:57 +0900, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> 
>>>>>What's all this stuff about "compositing managers" ?
>>>>>
>>>>>I don't get why 3D composited X windows are "hard" or complex to do.
> 
> Read http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsd2005/herrb-hopf.pdf
> for an overview of modern X features.
> 
>>>There's little documentation on what a compositing manager *does*.
> 
> In this paper, there is. You will also find a lot of information on the
> wiki pages of various distributions.
> 
>>>I'll find out more about X internals when i've done porting a subset
>>>of it to another cpu (still to do). I don't need any of the 3D stuff
>>>just for a GUI, and would rather have a fast simple and small 2D GUI
> 
> Compositing has *nothing* to do with 3D. Xgl also does *not* provide you
> with a 3D GUI interface. In fact, there is no 3D GUI interface designed
> so far I know of (that has more than accademic use).
> 
>>>that runs on well on old hardware than a 3D one that is slow is
>>>molasses on a 10GHz pc. There's something fundamentally wrong when
>>>Win95/98 still beats X in every way (in part due to just the M$ widget
>>>system).
> 
> Does it? I'm surprised, it's dead slow compared to X for me.

A slight slip. I should have said "Win95/98 still beats X widget kits in every way".
I've made decent fast low-memory systems using only Xlib and my own stuff.
I would never use one of the current X widget systems for performance reasons,
usability reasons, or just plain poor design that they can't do what you want
(even writing a new widget for them can be a total bitch).