Subject: Re: NeWS speed

From: [email-masked] (Zalman Stern)
Date: Tue, 19 May 87 01:02:50 EDT

Date: Sun, 17 May 87 19:26:05 edt
From: [email-masked] (Zalman Stern)
Subject: Re: NeWS speed

I have worked with the Andrew window manager, the X11 alpha release, and used
NeWS. I would hardly call X11 3 times faster than NeWS. When you get right
down to it, the thing that takes lots of time is doing bitmap operations.
Parsing the PostScript or unpacking request buffers is somewhat lost in the
noise for most operations. NeWS is very fast at moving large bitmaps, and
drawing complex curves. In general, not to many people complain about the
*speed* of Gosling's programs.

The thing that bothered me was the memory utilization of these servers. We
expect the Andrew window manager to run in about 800k virtual memory/300k
resident set (this is assuming 4 applications, 6-8 heavyweight windows). All
the versions of X11 and NeWS I have seen quickly grow to over 2 megs of
virtual memory when you do anything with them. In the case of X11, it looked
like undebugged core leaks. I got the impression that NeWS was actually using
a sizable portion of its memory (i.e. it liked about 1 meg of resident set).
Paging will of course trash the performance of any window manger...

Issues I see as important:

1) X11 and NeWS are vastly different programming environments. X11 is much
closer to a typical graphics library, where NeWS can be anything you like.

2) PostScript is big in the electronic publishing market. One wonders if it
may become a standard for graphical data interchange.

3) Hardware potential. Which one will be first in silicon?

4) X11 is free. This alone may well kill off NeWS. (Why does MIT use GNU
emacs? Because its free in source code form...)

User Interface:

Neither X11 nor NeWS really enforces a given user interface. They both allow
you lots of freedom. There is something to be said for tighter user interface
control (i.e. Macintosh, Andrew). For example, one shouldn't be able to
assign 22 functions to the mouse (especially if some other application has
assigned 22 different functions). After a time, I expect to see numerous user
interfaces, some good, some bad.

Sincerely,
Zalman Stern
Internet: [email-masked]     Usenet: ...seismo!andrew.cmu.edu!zs01#
USPS:   Information Technology Center
        Carnegie Mellon University
        Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890