Re: [Crust-discuss] Goals?

[Johan Rydberg]

Wolfgang wrote:
> 
> Hi!

Hi Wolfgang!
 
> What are the technicals goals of the Crust project?

To create a windowing system that is not as "bloated" as X.
X has too many levels between the user and the hardware, which
creates alot of overhead.  Look at the Gnome program-to-hardware
interface:

   1.Device Drivers -- Handle keyboard and mouse input. 
   2.X server -- Handles graphical screen output and obfuscates keyboard and 
mouse, 
   3.Xlib -- A horrendously complex library for basic windowed graphics, 
   4.Gimp Drawing Kit -- Quarantines the atrocious Xlib within a wrapper 
library. 
   5.Gimp ToolKit -- Provides a set of widgets, or user interface elements, 
     like text boxes, buttons, scrollbars, etc. 
   6.Gnome -- Provides internationalization, audio support, the Gnome panel, 
     standard keybindings, standard icons, etc. 

I will try to decrease this the number of levels to atleast three and a half.

   1. Device drivers -- Handles graphic acceleration and framebuffer
   2.0. Surface server -- Handles onscreen surfaces
   2.1. Surface client library -- Provides drawing primitives, working on 
surfaces.
   3. Client library (for example GNUstep).

Another goal is to make it as fast as possible; Instead of making a RPC to
the server for every graphic primitive, almost everything is handled in the
client library.  When the client library is done with the update of the surface,
it notifies the surface server about it and it will move (bitblit) the surface 
into
the framebuffer.
 
> Cheers,
> GNU/Wolfgang (a Wolfgang-based Gnu)