[TUHS] Four windowing systems on SunOS

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:18 PM Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 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.

That sounds like a ton of codebases, though. I remember trying to port an
APL interpreter to 64-bit, and giving up; too much type puning of pointers
through int's.

        - Dan C.