Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

Hi,

I don't think this thread is of further use, at least not for this  
list. So I will just comment one paragraph which I believe is a  
common mistake. I hope you understand that.

> > Further, when I compare the results of GSBench (on a 400MHz PII  
with
> > an ultra fast graphics card) to those of NXBench (25MHz m68k) I get   
> > just scared...;-)
>
> Are you sure this comparison is fair as it is ?  We have an additional 
> layer, X, and X is very slow itself.

I cannot believe that X is so slow as many seem to believe (at least  
not in those magnitudes). I could run X on a i486 machine with 16  
Megs of RAM quite fine. What I cannot do is to run GS, GNOME, KDE or  
whatever desktop on such a machine, thus I believe the problem is  
mainly caused by such higher level technologies. Today we have  
gigahertz machines, ultrafast graphics cards and more than enough  
memory, I just refuse to believe that it is X and only X that makes  
GNUstep so slow.
The comparison is IMHO fair because I basically do not care about  
'under the hood issues' when I want to run an application: either it  
is fast enough or not. The fact that GNUstep runs more or less as  
fast on todays PCs as NEXTSTEP on old NeXTs (or slower in some  
respects) shows me 2 things:

A) NEXTSTEP and the NeXT machines are brilliantly engineered gems.
B) GNUstep gui is slow, either caused by unoptimised implementations  
and/or design flaws. I do not know the reason myself.

Thus - to go back to regular work - I believe we should care about  
perfomance, otherwise we will never see applications like Quantrix,  
Diagram or WetPaint on GNUstep - and we all agree that it's the  
existence of such 'killer apps' that is required to make GNUstep more  
popular.

cheers, Phil

--
Philippe C.D. Robert | Senior Developer
http://www.groupville.com - GroupWare made easy!