Re: [9front] Thoughts on Wayland?

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

> needs to be. Plus, AA really benefits everyone, and
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Rendering_Extension is only for fonts, not
> for arbitrary graphics. (Same problem as on Plan 9. Should we blame Keith
> Packard for not going further than just font rendering?) There's no way to
> have AA in arbitrary 2D graphics rendered on the X server, AFAIK.

What do you need AA for at all? It just makes everything look blurry
to me, and even for fonts I often disable this behavior (Though at my
low resolution that works only for high quality fonts that have good
hinting parameters embedded).
A lot of software depends on hand-crafted pixel art in their icons, I
see only downsides, let's avoid resampling and AA completely unless we
render our own oversampled images from something of much higher or
infinite (vector) resolution (for example like with fonts).

> So
> basically the widget toolkits gave up on supporting efficient networked X11
> ages ago, and not for completely frivolous reasons.

If they tried at all!

> But if video streaming is the solution, it seems to me an assumption is
> being made that the server (where the applications run) has a GPU then: it
> would help for rendering the applications (with AA, blending, animations
> and all), and it would help for video compression too. Somewhat of a break
> from tradition then. I agree that a solution designed specifically with low
> bandwidth and low latency in mind ought to be better. But is 9p really for
> that? I'm trying to work that way; time will tell...

My guess would be it's the other way around, the blit specific
multiplexing idea survives in a generalized way as 9p.
The precursor to the draw RPCs were meant to be multiplexed together
with other concurrent streams from and to the blit terminal, only
later 9p generalized this approach to cover not just terminals and
their mouse, keyboard and display. Instead, every ressource can be
accessed as a file and all file access multiplexed over a single 9p
mount. This is nicer than a new custom multiplexing protocol for every
service.
Back then multiplexing multiple concurrent accesses over a single
synchronous bidirectional pipe must have seemed like magic. I fear it
still does on the other Unix-descendants.
It still seems like magic when I see them reinventing it over and over
again in the HTTP2 and Quic fields.