Re: [dwm] XCB?

tobiasu:
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:32:25PM +0100, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
> > 2008/9/14 Johannes Wegener <ih-mon_AT_gmx.de>:
> > > I recently read that awesome is going to use XCB over Xlib and says that
> > > it is faster becouse it is asynchronous.
> > > Does XCB realy its job faster than Xlib?
> > > And if this is the case is dwm going to use XCB in any further release?
> >
> > I'd be interested in benchmarks proving this thesis. Xlib isn't
> > synchronous either, though it can be enforced by clients to process
> > all pending requests using XSync(). I'd bet that a thread-safe Xlib
> > reimplementation from scratch using C might be a lot faster than XCB,
> > since XCB is generated code in plenty parts.
> >
> > > Just some stupid questions - don't take them to serious - I like dwm and
> > > how it is,its just some kind of intrest in that thing of XCB :)
> >
> > I have in mind to give dwm on xcb a try.
>
> Keep in mind that this locks out a number of users not running bleeding
> edge stuff...

I think this is the biggest concern. Just look at the dependencies:

    http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=18981

    cairo-xcb
    dbus
    gtk2
    imlib2
    libev
    libgpg-error
    libxcb
    lua
    luafilesystem

So that's starting to get a bit serious.

On Debian it is just ridiculous,

    http://packages.debian.org/experimental/awesome

    dep libc0.1
    dep: libc6
    dep: libc6.1
    dep: libcairo2
    dep: libdbus-1-3
    dep: libev3
    dep: libglib2.0-0
    dep: libgtk2.0-0
    dep: libimlib2
    dep: liblua5.1-0
    dep: libncurses5
    dep: libpango1.0-0
    dep: libreadline5
    dep: libx11-6
    dep: libxcb-atom0
    dep: libxcb-aux0
    dep: libxcb-event0
    dep: libxcb-icccm0
    dep: libxcb-keysyms0
    dep: libxcb-property0
    dep: libxcb-randr0
    dep: libxcb-render-util0
    dep: libxcb-render0
    dep: libxcb-xinerama0
    dep: libxcb1

Of course, this might pay off for them in the long run, once all this
stuff is supported.

The performance question is just advertising, without numbers.

Despite all this, they seem to be picking up users. Users like features, I guess.

-- Don
Received on Sun Sep 14 2008 - 19:00:34 UTC