Raymond Meyer wrote:
> 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.

That is correct.

> 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.

I totally agree.
I actually use Gtk+ just for a preview purpose as "how I think it should
be done". Before I actually spend that much time designing and
implementing my own toolkit (which is a difficult task), I need both to
grasp how the current ones are done, and understand how they suck.
Plus, I badly need simple, efficient and coherent software now, and in
my own opinion Gtk+ was the only toolkit close enough to this up to and
including 2.6.

> 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.

Well, although parallel computing clearly is the future, however I do
not think we need to multi-thread every existing application along. To
me, the excessive number of processes one already needs to open a simple
X session is already enough to keep a dozen of processors busy.
Plus, multi-threaded programming is error prone, and any P200-class
machine with 64MB RAM should already be sufficient to run any regular
application anyway (to the exception maybe of a software-only media
player), so I think it is pointless to rewrite them for this sole
reason, and even worse a source of potential issues.

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

Same here :/
I do not understand how after 30 years of UNIX, we still do not have a
simple, coherent and efficient set of graphical tools that arbitrarily
work together as well as command-line tools do.

Just my 2 ¢, and just trying to implement my own sh*t and give it back.
I am relieved to hear I am not alone to feel this way. If you want to
know more about my I-am-reimplementing-everything project, feel free to
have a look at http://www.defora.org/ . By the way, it's not that I
dislike NetBSD or other OSes that much, but I think we can do better
than UNIX, and even portably enough so that it also runs on UNIX.

HTH,
-- 
khorben