SJS wrote:
What sort of interactive performance are you worried about with X?
Basic responsiveness when the computer is under heavy load.
Video playback and 3D handling, I'll grant that X is pretty sucky. Not sure what you're getting at with fonts or international input.
The issue is that the moment you start poking at international character sets, practically everything breaks. You have to bash your entire font system to get a font that works with international characters but then looks sucky on ASCII characters. Every system and sometimes application has a different way to enter Unicode characters--and it generally sucks.
And vertical text is an exercise in hilarity.
Even so... what are the X programmers working on? I was under the impression that they were working on all (most?) of those things in your list. Looking at http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.1/doc/RELNOTES.html It looks like they're working on direct hardware access (hello video and 3d), font support, unicode (international input?), and drivers (new video chipsets?). What more do you want?
Um, the date is 200*6*. We have *SHINY* things like Compiz since then, while rendering multiple fonts in a toolkit window still dies horribly under *ALL* toolkits (equal blame to X11 and Gtk/Qt/etc.).
And the Qt and Gtk guys couldn't come to agreement on a common rendering engine. If I'm feeling charitable, I'll chalk it up to differences in technical focus (Trolltech looks at portable very strongly). If I'm feeling uncharitable, I'll chalk it up to Trolltech couldn't extract money out of an LGPL piece of tech (Cairo) and so had to roll their own.
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