More OpenLook questions

[Neil Hunt]

I just ported an  application  from  the  Decstation  3100  to  a
SparcStation  330, and I have to confess that the openwindows
implementation left me somewhat underwhelmed.   I believe it was
openwindows 2.0 FCS.  I found that drawing operations on the window were
moderately fast (perhaps .8 times the speed of the DecStation), but any
interactions involving the window manager seemed horrible, perhaps only
10% the speed of the DecStation.  For  example  popping up a new window
(or menu), moving windows, unburying windows, resizing, etc.

The worst is the mouseahead problem.  This  is  when  you  select
`focus-follows-mouse'  instead  of  `click-to-focus'. If there is anything
at all happening on the machine, when you move the mouse from one window
to  the  another,  and start typing, for a few _seconds_ the keystrokes
are sent to the wrong window, probably a few  are  lost  altogether while
the window manager wakes up, and finally they start arriving at the
indicated  window.   I  _have_ noticed this on the DecStation, but only
when there is exceptional activity, such as multiple simultaneous large
compiles, or a large core-dump  happening,  but  it is _much_ worse on the
Sun. This seems like a fundamental X windows bug, which  ought  to be
fixable. I wonder why it still persists?

Furthermore, the olwm seems to fail to differentiate between classes of
windows: e.g. application windows or transient windows; all my windows
were decorated, whereas under twm my transient windows remain undecorated
and hence smaller and faster.  I also dislike the way the windows are
placed pseudo randomly on the screen instead of having an opportunity to
place them explicitly with the mouse.

For the record, my application is developed using the  InterViews package
of C++ classes.  I also tossed out most of the DecWindows stuff, and
installed generic X clients, although the Dec X server is apparently much
faster than the generic X server.

I am interested in people's experiences with  making  the  window system
adequately fast.  Do you chuck the olwm and use something like twm?  Is it
better to get the generic X implementation  from the  X  consortium
rather  than use sun's extended X server with display postscript
extensions, or is that slower still?  Is there a  2.0  after  FCS?   (The
Sun rep I spoke to asked whether I had used OpenWindows 2.0, and wasn't it
amazingly fast!)  How  is  it on  a  SparcStation  1+ compared to a 330?
Does the GX option do anything?

Neil/.		Neil%teleos.com at ai.sri.com