X Window System Turns 30 Years Old

An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest pieces of the Linux desktop stack still widely in use today is the X Window System that today is commonly referred to as X11 or in recent years the X.Org Server. The X Window System predates the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, GCC, and other key pieces of the Linux infrastructure — or most software widely-used in general. Today marks 30 years since the announcement of X at MIT when it was introduced to Project Athena." X wasn't new when I first saw it, on Sun workstations the summer before I started college. When did you first encounter it?

Comments

Sun Lab in '87

[Greyfox]

I saw it in a Sun lab at RPI in '87. It was running some clunky-ass version of CDE. Or maybe it was just plan CDE.

It's funny, I'm working on a project for which a lot of the components were coded back in the mid '90s. The state of the art really hasn't advanced since then. The basic API (Xlib/Motif/Xcb) are nominally well documented -- you can find books and the library calls have man pages. Newer libraries and X extensions are a hodge-podge of largely-undocumented and generally incompatible API calls that take more work to integrate than they do to program in (Assuming you can find an example to work from.) The actual frameworks typically require you to drink all their kool-aid in order to use the framework. So I could go GTK+ or QT, learn their idioms and framework implementation details and that's great assuming I never want to change frameworks again and am willing to accept their quirks. And outside of QT, everyone (including motif/xlib) re-invent C++ badly with home-rolled type systems which often involve pushing strings around. Brilliant.

Somehow despite all this it still does what it does better than anything else I've seen. I'm not sure how this is possible, but there you go.

Re:DECwindows ;)

[Archtech]

We spent an inordinate amount of time and effort explaining (often to people with considerable software experience) why "client" and "server" were the wrong way round.

Re:time to die...

[TheRaven64]

The protocol is fine,

Except for the fact that it has a limited set of extensions that can be supported and a load of command numbers are used for 'core protocol' stuff that no one has used for over a decade. It has no concept of security (you can easily steal input from another application, for example).

the library isn't that horrible unless your a newbie to dev

XCB is pretty nice, but xlib is a clusterfuck. It hides interfaces that need to be used asynchronously for good performance behind synchronous API calls. It's impossible to write an application that performs well over a network and does a nontrivial amount of drawing with xlib. It is with XCB, but it requires carefully designing your toolkit for asynchronous drawing, and all modern X toolkits have too much xlib heritage to easily adapt to using XCB as it's intended to be used, rather than as a lighter-weight xlib.