Re: Anybody working on XCB/XCL backend?



On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 16:12, Christian Neumair wrote:

> Is anybody of you already working on a XCB/XCL [1] GTK+ backend? If not,
> I'd like to volunteer for adding such a backend. Although I'm not yet
> experienced with that kind of low-level stuff, I hope to gain enough
> experience to get good results quickly.

To my knowledge, nobody is working on this. So, if you want to start,
great!

A few things I should mention though:

 - Xlib is implicitly part of the GDK API/ABI. I don't think we could
   ship a libgdk-x11-2.so.0 that didn't link to an Xlib binary
   compatible with the current Xlib. Since producing such a Xlib is
   part of the goals of the Xcb project, this is not a fundamental
   barrier, but it does limit the advantages you can get in footprint.

 - If you want to look at the advantages you can get with a compatible
   backend, you'd probably want to start off by rewriting 
   gdk/x11/gdkasync.c to use Xcb. Then do some protocol traces
   (using xmon or whatever) and see what remaining excess roundtrips
   could be improved. (Though I think we got the main ones already)

 - Writing an "incompatible" backend - an Xlib-free gdk-xcb-2.so.0 - 
   is probably a better test of Xcb, though I'm not sure it's 
   immediately useful for applications.

   There are some other interesting things you could fool around
   within a GDK backend that broke hybrid GDK/Xlib application
   compatibility ... e.g., getting rid of server-side subwindows
   altogether. But it's probably best to concentrate on one
   thing at a time.

Regards,	
						Owen

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