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From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: GUI Portability: Say MOTIF
Message-ID: <1266@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 3 Oct 89 22:59:58 GMT
References: <434@maytag.waterloo.edu> <2927@ur-cc.UUCP> <8105@ardent.UUCP> <2982@ur-cc.UUCP> <13724@grebyn.com> <3014@ur-cc.UUCP> <1256@quintus.UUCP> <4187@sugar.hackercorp.com> <20034@usc.edu> <1261@quintus.UUCP> <20214@usc.edu>
Reply-To: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 42

I'll keep this to Amiga-relevant stuff:

In article <20214@usc.edu> papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>In article <1261@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
>>[The X toolkit] is extremely complicated, and huge.  For
>>example, xclock, by no means a full-featured clock program, is 278528
>>bytes compiled for a sun3.  
>
>Ever heard of virtual memory? For UNIX that doesn't really matter.

On the Amiga it does.  The original poster was suggesting that Motif be
the basis for a standard Amiga interface.  If it only works on 2500s
under Eunuchs, that doesn't make it much of a standard.

>Dale is said to be working on an Amiga 
>shared X library, which will solve the program size on a non-virtual memory 
>machine like the Amiga.

I wonder how big an Xlib.library + Xtk.library + Motif.library would be?
Or would there be a separate library for each Motif widget class?  At
any rate, the link libraries compiled for a sun3 are quite large.
libX11.a (the Xlib library) is 199K and libXt.a is 179K.  And no, this
doesn't have anything to do with the athena widgets (that's libXaw.a and
libXmu.a, another 137K + 25K; Motif is likely to be bigger).

My point is simply that X won't be a base-level home computer system
anytime soon, due to memory considerations.

>You can have X on the Amiga, Sun, IBM, Mac, etc... TODAY and run the same
>application on the Amiga at home and on your Sun at work.

So why do you need to make Motif a standard Amiga interface?

There is an attempt to build a portable windowing interface called
STDWIN.  That's about all I know about it.  Does anyone know if there
are Amiga and X interfaces for it?  If so, this might be a reasonable
approach to writing applications that work under both X and Intuition.

-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds