You seem to be misunderstanding that I'm advocating that X-Windows be replaced by NeWS in 2019. That's not at all what I'm saying.
I guess you're one of those people who always uses the noscript extension in your browser, and drives to the bank, pays for a parking place, and waits in line instead of using online banking.
Have you ever used Google Maps? Are you arguing that everybody should turn off JavaScript and use online maps that you scroll by clicking and waiting for another page to load?
You must really hate it when WebGL shaders download code into your GPU!
Considering I'm the author of one of the more technically advanced WebGL apps out there ( https://noclip.website/), I understand the power of the web as an application delivery platform.
NeWS-style programmability does not have the same advantages. I cannot host a NeWS application in one place and send a single link to let others run it.
The NeWS architecture put graphics rendering responsibility on the server with Display PostScript (also a mistake X11 made), and the scripting was so you could design a button in one process and instance it in another. It was a workaround for the lack of shared libraries, not a way of moving computation to a data center (the reason you use AJAX).
No, NeWS didn't use Display PostScript. A common misconception. Adobe's Display PostScript extension to X11 didn't have any support for input, event handling, threading, synchronization, networking, object oriented programming, user interface toolkits, window management, arbitrarily shaped windows, shared libraries and modules, colormaps and visuals, X11 integration, or any of the other important features of NeWS.
We actually wrote an X11 window manager in NeWS, with tabbed windows, pie menus, rooms, scrolling virtual desktops, etc. Try doing that with Display PostScript.
And it actually performed much better than was possible for an X11 window manager, since X11 window managers MUST run in a separate process and communicate via an asynchronous network protocol, incurring lots of overhead like context switching, queuing, marshaling and unmarshaling, server grabbing, etc.
You seems to have a lot of misconceptions about NeWS, and how and why it was designed and implemented. I suggest you read the X-Windows disaster article I wrote in 1993, and the original paper about Sundew by James Gosling, "SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System", which he published in Methodology of Window Management in 1985.
Again: I'm not advocating that X-Windows be replaced by NeWS in 2019. I'm saying that Wayland didn't learn from the lessons on NeWS. And that a much better solution would be to push Electron down the stack to the bare metal, to become the window system itself.
How do you reconcile your use of WebGL and JavaScript with your distaste for embedded programmability? Or do you just hold your nose with one hand and type with the other, the way I program X11? ;)
No response? I'd still like to know how you reconcile this:
>Embedded programmability has ended up being a security disaster.
With this:
>I'm the author of one of the more technically advanced WebGL apps out there
Do you believe your "more technically advanced WebGL app" is a "security disaster"?
If so, perhaps you should take it down, instead of linking to it! I'm afraid to click on such an ominous link to what you describe as a security disaster.
I had a response and even posted it for a few seconds but deleted it because the back-and-forth would continue so I just wanted you to have the last word peacefully.
But since you posted a second time I'll at least tell you why I didn't give you an in depth response.
> I guess you're one of those people who always uses the noscript extension in your browser
Imagine that not only your browser, but the entire system cripples because of poorly written trackers, ad spots with animated sprites floating over mp4 videos, and 0day exploits like the one that was recently found in the wild (and there was plenty of vulnerabilities in PostScript implementations as well, so in this sense your analogy is pretty much spot-on). Sure, that's the system of the future that everyone should've switched to decades ago.
I guess you're one of those people who always uses the noscript extension in your browser, and drives to the bank, pays for a parking place, and waits in line instead of using online banking.
Have you ever used Google Maps? Are you arguing that everybody should turn off JavaScript and use online maps that you scroll by clicking and waiting for another page to load?
You must really hate it when WebGL shaders download code into your GPU!