Re: Emacs as a desktop environment

[David De La Harpe Golden]

On 28/05/11 11:44, Nix wrote:

> It's using higher-level toolkits.

Sortof. gtk+ emacs is a actually a mix of toolkit and direct xlib calls, 
for a variety of reasons, some good, some just historical.  A "pure 
gtk+" (or at least "pure gtk+ and probably cairo and stuff") emacs would 
be a possibility, but AFAIK a currently hypothetical one, and a lot of 
work for dubious return (especially since longstanding gtk+ rather than 
emacs bugs like the famous "closing display? hey, let's kill everything" 
and "hey, don't tell us how scrollbars work" presumably wouldn't go away).

AFAIUI the main thing really stalling wholesale movement to xcb and 
retirement of xlib in general is the absence of an xlib-free replacement 
for GLX. Right now, if an x11 app/toolkit/canvas ever wants to use 
accelerated opengl rendering (and "everyone" wants those fancy 3d 
effects these days...), it /must/ link to xlib (even if xlib itself is 
sitting on top of xcb) - see writeup here:

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/opengl/

(note as the link explains xcb-glx is not sufficient, it's only part of 
the puzzle).  Work on removing the xlib dependency for opengl apps seems 
to proceed in fits and starts, typically coincidental with GSoC projects...