Re: gui 'slow' with remote X ?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 8 Dec 2008, at 16:27, Nicolas Roard wrote:
> Irrespective of the scroll issue, exposing the view hierarchy to the  
> backend
> would still be quite interesting:
> - we could have specialised backends using native widgets when  
> available,
> for better integration with the host platform
> - we could have faster remote display as well (see NX) by being able  
> to
> use local widgets and thus save on many round-trips

My feeling is that the frontend should know nothing about the backend  
beyond the stable API we define for gui to use, so that we can easily  
switch the backends we are using without having to have code changes  
in the gui to support it.

The issue really does not apply the other way round ... we are not  
expecting a backend to have to deal with more than one implementation  
of the gui, so it's OK for the backend to know a lot about the gui,  
certainly for it to know all about the published AppKit API and make  
use of any feature it likes.

Are you suggesting going beyond that and implementing specific  
features in the gui for the backend to use?  That doesn't seem  
terribly unreasonable as long as such things can be clearly specified  
and documented and become part of the public gui api ... but I think  
we'd want to keep that sort of thing to a minimum and try to avoid  
limiting our options about how we implement things in the gui.