[TUHS] Four windowing systems on SunOS

Jon Steinhart jon at fourwinds.com
Tue Nov 1 05:17:59 AEST 2022


Larry McVoy writes:
> Sunview was a toolkit - a really nice one in my opinion, every api had
> a set of defaults and a key, so you could call sv_whatever(SV_DONE)
> and did whatever with the default values.  But you could override the
> defaults like so sv_whatever(SV_SOMEKEY, some_value, SV_DONE).  It
> kept the system from being very verbose.
>
> People like Sunview's api enough that there was an Xview toolkit which
> was Sunview ported to X10/X11.

Yeah, but it had its own issues.  I did an emergency late night and weekend
consulting contract with Sun because Xview kept crashing.  Turns out that
the code had some very suspect pointer dereferencing that worked until the
SPARC processors came along and barfed at unaligned accesses.

Jon


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