On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 15:46:25 +0100
Pierre Pronchery <khorben@defora.org> wrote:

> 	Hi ports/sparc64,
> 
> I am currently developing a bunch of desktop applications which I also
> intend to run on my sparc64 machine, simply because I don't like the
> existing desktop environments (Gnome/KDE/XFCE/...). Most also happen to
> not be multi-threaded. I develop in C with Gtk+ >= 2.4, with as few
> external dependencies as currently possible.
> 
> For this matter I am curious to know if anyone of you also intends to
> use a sparc64 machine as desktop, and may also be looking for an
> alternative to current applications in this area.

I use Sun Ultra 10 mainly as a desktop and a development machine. I don't use
NetBSD but run Solaris instead, NetBSD sparc64 port is unusable for threaded
applications, due to threading bugs in the core OS.

In regard to desktop applications, most of them suck. GTK+ sucks ass, so I
don't know why you decided to use those GUI libs. A step in the right direction
would be to come up with a new GUI framework, something minimalistic and
extensible. I'm not an expert on GUI programming, but when GTK file chooser
freezes for 16 seconds, eating CPU time while I try to browse a directory
containing a large number of files, I can tell the person who designed that
software was a complete idiot.

Multicore processor architectures are the future, so most software would need
to be redesigned and rewritten with concurrency in mind. Parallel programming,
performance and robustness are the things that the programmers should be
focusing on, and not stupid eye candy that you get with most GUI frameworks,
that slow down the software to the point of utter irritation.

PS. the above is not really relevant to sparc64, but I had it on my mind for
quite some time now.