ponderings

Can anyone point me to and FTP site with papers on Sun NEWS?

Last night, I played with the idea of MADO messages being in some
language (the choice of language would probably be one of lisp,
postscript, forth, or a specially written one). Sun NEWS, and NeXT use
a kind of postscript, and they seem to be very good.

At first I thought that it must be really bad for performance, but
later, I was thinking of all the things people do with a window
system. Basically, I thought of 3 things: display text, draw graphics,
and use UI's. I figure that if some of the larger, but frequently used
UI operations (for example menu's), could be "downloaded", it would
probably reduce the amount of client->window system traffic a lot (ie.
instead of sending perhaps 20 draw messages, we just send one "call
function" message. It would seem that, provided we have a fast
language intepreter, performance would *increase*, especially network
performance. Also, client programs using UI's might become
smaller/simpler. This idea could be extended to bitblt as well. For
example, if a user downloads a menu into MADO, it could download the
drawing parts to bitblt. I kind of like the idea. Does anyone have any
comments?

I should note that even though I like the idea, I currently plan to do
the messaging in a different way. VSTa *is* an experimental system
though, so if I get positive feedback, I might just go ahead and do
it.

BTW. It seems that GUI's were far from Rob Pike's mind when he wrote
8.5. I plan to eventually write a UI toolkit for VSTa and MADO
(Actually, I plan to port a few UI toolkits I've written/am writing).
However, for now, my main goal is to have most text-based programs run
without changes, and to provide a small, flexible API.
Received on Tue Oct 19 16:34:38 1993