Re: X11 over modems, and Java OS X

[W . Northcott]

Marcus wrote:
>Woo hoo!  X11 over modems!  My favorite!  Yeah, well I once ported a

Now that is unusable.  We use VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc). It
is magic software, runs on every computer known to man (there about five
viewers already for Mac OS X), and is usable over a phone connection.  The
big difference is that as you only 'view' a remote virtual X server using
VNC, the remote computer does not have to wait for your display to update.
 It can run at full speed and your display will catch up later.  Also it
can easily be tunneled through SSH if you are paranoid like me.  Finally
the viewer is less than 1MB of compiled code compared with how much? for
an Xserver with all its fonts.

Finally back to the ideas of MacOS X.  Is the Java version of Swarm yet to
the point where it can substitute for the X stuff like tk and blt?  If so,
it should not be too hard to compile on OS X.  I have compiled a couple of
GNU items on OS X and it was not hard once you discover the useful stuff
hidden in the developer software for compiling GNU.  If Java can be left
to cope with all the graphical display, it ought to work without too much
strife.

Marcus wrote way back
>The version of GCC on MacOS X Public Beta is non-standard and broken
>in a number of ways. For example, it doesn't handle nested functions
>at all, and has trouble with some of the call construction routines
>in libobjc. Further, they use a different Objective C runtime library
>than the GNU system does, and Swarm relies on the GNU system in a deep
way.

Having hacked about there now, why does it matter what libobjc Apple use
because Swarm uses its own?
I am not inspired to spend any more time on the OS X beta because it is
now very different to the release version, but Apple just sent me a
discount coupon to pre-order the March 24 release.  So it got me thinking.

Bill Northcott



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