XDRIVER (Re: Wish List)

[Darrell McCauley]

Craig asked me to comment more on the XDRIVER addition
to the Wish List. I'm not majorly concerned with displays
(numbers are my thing 8^), but from listening to comments
over the past several months, and from my own experiences
in writing display programs, I had a few things in mind. 
First, 24 bit displays. An X display program should make
full use of whatever hardware is available (do we even
include monochrome fb's?)

Next, elimination of fifos - communicate just like any
other X program. This has been my biggest frustration,
esp w.r.t. Solaris 2. I'm not sure if this is part of the
NFS slowness or just something uniq to the OS, but
graphics are painfully slow on LX's in my shop (which
constitute the majority of machines here; e.g., try
running g.gnuplot if you want to see "slowness").  This
has drastically slowed down my code development work (s.semivar)
because of the length of compile/test sequences.

Maybe this won't be as big of a problem
when we get 2.3 installed on all machines here, but I'm
not holding my breath (I haven't been given privy to a
machine running 2.3 right now). NFS is 2.3 is 
supposedly *much* better.

What happens w.r.t. CDE? 

Does {anyone} use anything other than the XDRIVER for
screen displays? By {anyone}, I guess I mean paying
customers which CERL supports.

Redoing this is probably something that would not be done
by recreational programmers "on the outside" (like me).

Before "floating point now" (still have my button :)
this used to be number one on the wish list. 

--Darrell