🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26919@cup.portal.com> spage@cup.portal.com (S spage Page) writes:
>You could argue that using PostScript as the extension language is a
>dubious choice.  

Indeed I would.  
Postscript is great inside printers.
Just like Forth is great inside diagnostic ROM's.
As a programming language for the high level functionality of windows,
I remain unconvinced.
In my experience, NeWS servers have tended to crash and hang a lot when 
presented with something unfamiliar.   And that's not writing postscript 
code, but using utilities provided by the likes of Sun and SGI.

I personally don't like the idea of loading alien code that's as low
level as postscript into my window server.  The scheme just doesn't 
seem robust enough.  X has a lot of warts, but it at least seems like 
an X server can be written to protect itself from flakey applications.

>Software elegance and flat-out knock-em-dead technical wizardry never
>won the "war", 

I haven't looked for a while, but I remember the xnews server being
one of the most bloated pieces of software I have ever seen.
Elegance, in my experience, usually ends up compact.

If NeWS is so elegant, then how come it isn't the "default" window system
offered by Sun yet?

SGI uses it, but doesn't everybody do their SGI graphics programs 
with gl?  I know I do.  And I've hung the SGI NeWS server by hitting
control-C at the wrong time.
I'm writing this on a DecStation that has a pretty solid window system 
product based on X. I have never hung or crashed the server, and I've
been writing an X application.  (Granted, I've hung X servers on other 
platforms, but those also tended to have brain-dead versions of Unix.)

My main complaint about X is that it is too loosely coupled to toolkits.
As an application programmer, I don't want to have to decide between
Motif/XView/Athena-Widgets/whatever.  
I just want a robust server and a good toolkit.
Sun may win the window wars yet, but if they do methinks it will be because 
of the XView toolkit, not NeWS.

>Disclaimer: I worked at Sun and wrote the NeWS 1.0 manual.

Disclaimer: I worked at Sun when the graphics group had to make patches 
to SunView because the windows group was too swamped with bugs in their 
unreleasable versions of NeWs that they refused to do maintainance 
on the released software.  

Dan McCoy     ...!ucbvax!pixar!mccoy