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Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders

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  Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders Marek Mosiewicz <marek.mosiewicz@jotel.com.pl> - 2021-02-07 11:40 +0100
    Re: Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders Gregory Seidman <gsslist+debian@anthropohedron.net> - 2021-02-08 03:40 +0100
      Re: Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2021-02-08 04:10 +0100
        Re: Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders Gregory Seidman <gsslist+debian@anthropohedron.net> - 2021-02-08 04:30 +0100
        Re: Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-02-08 08:40 +0100

#231452 — Jus thinking - Low level X GUI with shaders

Hi,

I would like to share my thoughts considering remote appliation
problem.

In beginnig there was X server :) It was designed in mind to enable
using of applications in distributed environment. You could open window
which was just running on other computer.

Time passed and things changed. There is attitiude to use Wayland for
Unix GUI which is fast versitile and easy, but not remote.

On other side remote apps tend to be run in browser, which is nightmare
for developer.

X server demise is caused, by difficult problem it tries to solve.
Abstracting GUI toolit protocool is painful. 

But I just look into idea that you do not need to do so. I think it
could be possible to pass shader program to X server (even as string).
This shader program could be whole GUI lib. It could manage theme,
layouts, fonts, widgets, data model on its own on x server. It would
depend on widget system how exchange data between client and server.

There are already similar solutions done in browser by libs like Apache
Wicket, ZKOSS and others. They act for user input, send it to server
and server sends updates client. However client state (or rather X
server) is rich and you update it by widget properties so communication
is really efficient.



Cheers,
   Marek Mosiewicz
   http://marekmosiewicz.pl

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#231475

On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 10:53:19AM +0100, Marek Mosiewicz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to share my thoughts considering remote appliation
> problem.
> 
> In beginnig there was X server :) It was designed in mind to enable
> using of applications in distributed environment. You could open window
> which was just running on other computer.
[...]
> But I just look into idea that you do not need to do so. I think it
> could be possible to pass shader program to X server (even as string).
> This shader program could be whole GUI lib. It could manage theme,
> layouts, fonts, widgets, data model on its own on x server. It would
> depend on widget system how exchange data between client and server.
[...]

You have reinvented NeWS with Display PostScript
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS>. Don't get me wrong, it was a great
idea, ahead of its time, and not especially well (or efficiently)
implemented at the time, so it may well be ripe for reinvention. Given that
we have much better facilities for sandboxing and hardware accelerated
graphics than we did at the time, now might be the time.

> Cheers,
>    Marek Mosiewicz
>    http://marekmosiewicz.pl
--Gregory

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#231480

> You have reinvented NeWS with Display PostScript
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS>. Don't get me wrong, it was a great
> idea, ahead of its time, and not especially well (or efficiently)
> implemented at the time, so it may well be ripe for reinvention.

I think nowadays the idea is called HTML, where the display server is
called "web browser" and Javascript has replaced Display Postscript.


        Stefan

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#231481

On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 10:07:28PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > You have reinvented NeWS with Display PostScript
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS>. Don't get me wrong, it was a great
> > idea, ahead of its time, and not especially well (or efficiently)
> > implemented at the time, so it may well be ripe for reinvention.
> 
> I think nowadays the idea is called HTML, where the display server is
> called "web browser" and Javascript has replaced Display Postscript.

You're not wrong, in the sense that that covers a wide variety of use
cases. There remains a niche for rich desktop GUIs that 1) can display
remotely, 2) execute sandboxed code on the display server, and 3) play nice
with a windowing system rather than being just a "page". I wouldn't be
unhappy with that sandboxed code being JavaScript (or even WASM). I would
be unhappy with every GUI app I use running a web server and launching a
browser to http://localhost:<SomeRandomPort>/

>         Stefan
--Gregory

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#231484

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 10:07:28PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > You have reinvented NeWS with Display PostScript
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS>. Don't get me wrong, it was a great
> > idea, ahead of its time, and not especially well (or efficiently)
> > implemented at the time, so it may well be ripe for reinvention.
> 
> I think nowadays the idea is called HTML, where the display server is
> called "web browser" and Javascript has replaced Display Postscript.


...or how an otherwise decently sound design principle evolves into an
advertisment industry fueled Frankensteinish nightmare ;-)

cheers
 - t

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