Paolo Alexis Falcone wrote:
It really all depends on whether the decades old architecture of X is holding us back and as such is better shoved into an isolated part and no longer enhanced, or if its extension mechanism is still up to the task of embracing the latest innovations without compromise.
Actually, it's really going to be hard bolting in advanced rendering capabilities without changing the protocol or making some serious extensions to X.
This is what the XRender extension is all about and it has been inside XFree (and Xorg) for a long time already and is a well accepted extension.
I'm not sure how elegant the Xrender API is from a programming standpoint or whether it makes any compromises in the name of being able to work with X, but there don't seem to be too much complaints about it.
On the other hand, it's hard to bolt-in network transparency to Aqua or the Windows GUI as they weren't designed with that in mind, as they were designed to interact heavily with the onboard hardware, and not with networked resources.
The more bandwidth and CPU power you have (which is the situation today) the more X's original assumptions of network transparency start to make sense.
The caveat is that the rest of X's architecture is dated - and the question is whether its extension mechanism will allow for a graceful / elegant / no-compromise 'bolting on' of new features which might otherwise require a very different base architecture from what X has.
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