Xorg (Xgl) and Vista

I was reading over lunch today and I stumbled across this:

Redirecting GDI, DirectX, and WPF applications – http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/archive/2006/05/02/588934.aspx

A couple of weeks ago I was at Microsoft and upon seeing a demo of Vista, some guy in the audience said “how do they do that?” and I said “I know exactly how they do that.” Of course I don’t know the code behind it, but since Apple is doing it and Linux is doing it, I figured I had a good idea of the abstract. The concepts are all the same.

At the break I proceeded to discuss it with a small group of people and I mentioned that this is nothing new and that OSX and even Linux has it. Specifically I told them to check out the Brainshare keynote to see a demo that is just as impressive, if not more so.

The above post I find interesting because it is the first time I’ve seen the challenges of this from MS point of view listed out. They look exactly like many of the X11 performance issues of the past. Specifically the section named “Drawing To and Reading From the Screen — Baaaad!” reminds me exactly of some very terse emails sent by a certain programmer of the enlightenment window manager 7 or so years ago now.

At the time uninformed people were always complaining about X. They said it was too slow and we should abandon it in favor of something else. With things like Xgl right around the corner in mainstream distributions, I think time has proven these people wrong. It is interesting to see that MS had to deal with some of the same performance issues.