[self-interest] Self and X Windows - The future

[Ian Woollard]

Decoupling the sharing from the graphics seems desirable to me.

You'd be better off using 'local' graphics and doing your sharing via an
RPC-type mechanism I think.

On 13 September 2011 05:24, Russell Allen <mail at russell-allen.com> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I promised to write up a more details look at Self on X, so here it is. I
> want to start a discussion on this because it's important.
>
> X Windows is used by Self for two different purposes. The first purpose is
> for local morphic desktop on Linux systems. The second purpose is for remote
> desktop sharing, so that multiple developers can collaborate on a single
> Self world.
>
> X was the first gui language that Self spoke, back on Sun machines. The
> current OSX Cocoa/Carbon mix came after it.
>
> The basic X Windows protocols (as implemented in X.org) haven't changed
> over the years since then, but increasingly Linux systems in particular have
> stopped directly using them. Extensions to X.org have allowed changes to
> font rendering etc without updating the core protocols.
>
> As well, most applications on Linux no longer talk X directly, but instead
> use higher level libraries layered on top of X such as GTK and QT.  These
> libraries increasingly move towards multiple backends such as Wayland and
> the plan as I understand it is that X will be gradually replaced.
>
> One immediate consequence of this process has been that the old X font
> system which Self uses has fewer and fewer fonts available to it, and
> increasingly doesn't have the integration with the rest of the system that
> modern GTK or QT based applications have. This is why Self 4.4 doesn't work
> properly on Ubuntu 11.04. My quick and dirty solution which I've implemented
> makes sure that we default on Linux to a font we know still exists on the
> current version of Ubuntu.  It looks pretty ugly but is so basic that
> hopefully it won't go away in the immediate future.  It's a placeholder
> though, until we do one of the more comprehensive solutions below.
>
> The long term consequence is that eventually Self won't run at all on
> modern Linux distros.
>
> There are a few solutions to this which come to mind:
>
> - we can fix the immediate problem with fonts by implement the new
> primitives needed in the VM to use the newer Xft font system. This is a good
> thing to do, but won't fix our problems in the longer term.
>
> - we can implement the primitives and the Self code needed to target either
> GTK or QT rather than X. This makes us much more future proof and much more
> natively integrated with the Linux desktops. It doesn't however help with
> maintaining the remote access ability; we would have to write something like
> a VNC server to get that ability back.
>
> - we can target an intermediate layer designed for gaming, such as OpenGl
> and OpenAL, or SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/) which is also cross platform
> so might help us with Windows in the future. I think that comparable
> projects such as Croquet and Factor have done this?
>
> - we can bypass the native API entirely, and implement a bridge between the
> existing Self canvas and a HTML canvas element - that is make a browser
> interface to morphic which is fast enough to be used locally. Assuming that
> this can be made fast and solid enough, it would also give us our remote
> access in an even better form than we have at the moment. This solution
> could even be done without adding any primitives beyond the existing socket
> ones. The potential downside is that the canvas element in browsers remains
> as I understand it slower and buggier than direct access to the system gui
> libraries; it might be harder to get more interesting 3D or sound or video
> elements into our interfaces.
>
> All of the above solutions bind us into whatever we rely on, at least for
> that platform. It would be nice to write font rendering etc in Self and rely
> on a modern equivalent of bitblt but looking at the attempts historically by
> Squeak to do that I doubt we could pull it off with an acceptable quality.
>
> This is I think critical for the further use of Self and it's something I
> would consider helping out with funding if someone is seriously interested
> in tackling it.
>
> I'd be interested in your thoughts.
>
> Russell
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>


-- 
-Ian Woollard
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