From: MenTaLguY <mentalg@geocities.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 20:14:42 -0500 (EST)

Re: Some things that seem to be missing

On Wed, 26 Aug 1998, Olivier Galibert wrote:

> I'm reading  the new documentation   and  some useful  functionalities
> seems to be missing:
> - visual aliasing.  Some  ggi_visual_t  ggiMakeAlias(vis).  This would
>   make it possible to work on different frames or in with different GC
>   values simultaneously in different  threads.  The alternative  is to
>   pull the state from the visual and put it in an opaque GC structure.

Very good idea.

> - creating an "related" visual.  This means creating a visual in a new
>   display but on  the same graphic device  that a given visual.  Under
>   X,  it  would open a new  window,  under KGI  it  would create a new
>   virtual terminal, etc...  One on the targets is to be able to have a
>   GUI application (under XGGI/Berlin/whatever) that opens a fullscreen
>   visual in  a  new  mode.  Useful  for  games,  slide   shows, public
>   interactive systems with touch-screens...

Mmm... right; I've been trying to figure out a good way to generalize
creating a new VC/window/whatever for some time now.  I think that is the
best approach I've heard of so far.

> - the library  is not thread safe.   This is bad  bad bad bad  bad bad
>   bad.   This is going back  5-10 years in  time.  It makes code using
>   active threaded components a tremendous PITA to handle.  It probably
>   makes gwt next to useless for anything but X.   Oh, and did I say it
>   is bad?

Yes, that is INCREDIBLY bad... as few other people seem to care, I'm going
to have to mess with CVS and start throwing code at thread-saftey myself, I
guess.

Oh, and even the non-threaded version of the library should (must) still be
thread-_safe_ (or at least reentrant and maybe async-signal-safe)! Please,
people... consider the state of the technology!

-=MenTaLguY=-