latency_matters
I'm sick of software feeling slow, and waiting for all of these webanimations, and all of this.
Pavel Fatin » Blog Archive » Typing with pleasure - Blog about humanand tech… is an elaboratediscussion of why, exactly, latency matters for modern systems, and whywe might be losing it. Pavel Fatin » Blog Archive » Scrolling withpleasure - Blog about human andt… has the sameoutlook but tackles scrolling.
The compositor is evil \| Raph Levien’sblog:a take on compositing, or how guaranteeing a full render - among otherthings - leads to demonstrably slower user interaction overall when Xcan often get you window management abstraction for free. It's anoverview of lots of compositors and their interactions with the screen.
All of Raph's articles are incredibly detailed and informative, butAdvice for the next dozen Rust GUIs \| Raph Levien’sblogin particular lays plain all of the issues with developing a GUIframework today. Fast 2D rendering on GPU \| Raph Levien’sblogalso might be useful… I will need to figure out how to do this to writethe manager.
As noted in that article: it looks like there is some room to"strongarm" the ecosystem, insist that a particular compositorarchitecture is the way to go, and develop applications fit exclusivelyto and for this architecture. The window manager boundary feels like acritical point at which Linux infrastructure can evolve - so it might bebest to build a window manager, damn other abstractions, and fitsolutions to this specific WM.
We can't really get rid of Linux - but we can provide a cohesive, highlevel computing environment around it - and to do this we rewrite theWM.
Computer latency: 1977-2017 from DanLuu is a measurement of input lag over the years.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/193480622533120001: I cansend an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to thescreen.