Re: Motif support

[Akira Kyle <akira@akirakyle.com>]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 8:13 PM Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Aiko Kyle <aikokyle@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > It seems we just passed the 20th anniversary of the release of Emacs
> > 21! Since then, I think a lot of assumptions about hardware have
> > changed or are changing: GPUs are now ubiquitous, hidpi is here to
> > stay, laptops have precision multitouch trackpads and touch displays,
>
> None of which will require a rewrite to support.  In fact, Emacs 29
> already supports precision mice, high definition displays, multitouch
> trackpads, and digitizers.

I know emacs supports these, my point was more about things that
didn't exist when the current architecture of the display engine was
conceived and thus assumptions that were made about hardware for the
sake of performance do not necessarily now hold with newer hardware
(for example subpixel font rendering on hidpi). I'm by no means an
expert in how the display code has evolved since then so I can't say
whether a "rewrite from scratch" of that code today would look the
same as it does now. My point about firefox is that that code looks
vastly different today than it did 20 years ago (eg with webrender and
potential other components coming from servo) because the whole
architecture had to be rethought in order to take full advantage of
hardware acceleration (and they did a lot of experimenting to figure
out the "best" architecture).

>  On X, both the non-Cairo and Cairo builds
> make use of hardware acceleration whenever available through both the
> Glamor component of the X server and the X render extension.
>
> NS also makes use of hardware acceleration, and IIUC GDI (which is used
> in MS-Windows) is also hardware accelerated.

Sure, but the question isn't a binary one (hardware accelerated vs
not) but how well is the available hardware being utilized which is a
much more difficult question to answer.