mac@trantor.harris-atd.com (Mike McDonald) (03/21/89)
Has anyone tried out the X server for Symbolics' from ILA?
I played around with an early version at my Symbolics rep's
and was disappointed. It seemed pretty buggy. I am especially
interested in the server not in display my LispM screen on some
other machine. [I have a Symbolics on my desk whereas the rest
of the department have Suns.] Does anyone know of any other
Xservers for LispM's?
Thanks for any input,
Mike McDonald
mac@trantor.harris-atd.com
postmaster@trantor.harris-atd.com
(407) 727-5060
Advanced Technology Dept.
Harris Corp.
M.S. 3A-1912
P.O. Box 37
Melbourne, Florida
32902rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) (03/21/89)
Has anyone tried out the X server for Symbolics' from ILA?
I played around with an early version at my Symbolics rep's
and was disappointed. It seemed pretty buggy.
Yes, I bought it and have tried it, and I would probably have been less
charitable than you. It's pretty hard to believe they call it a product. E.g.
causing an xterm to scroll by typing carriage return will crash the server.
Does anyone know of any other Xservers for LispM's?
A (research) group in TI has been working on one for the Explorer, but there is
no claim about it ever being a product or even being available externally, that
I know of.barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin) (03/22/89)
We beta-tested ILA's X11, and I was very disappointed with the quality
of the version that they actually released, since most of the bugs I'd
reported hadn't been fixed. Admittedly, during the beta test period
they were mostly concerned with the X-Remote-Screen (i.e. client)
side.
After they released a version for Symbolics to distribute I was able
to convince them to work on the more serious server bugs. They've
fixed most of them, and an ECO is supposed to be distributed in the
near future. The one serious bug that they haven't fixed is one that
prevents some pop-up menus (all the UWM menus, and the xterm
scroll-bar menu) from working.
The X11 server they distribute is simply a port of the MIT sample X
server from X11R2 (they're in the process of porting the R3 server).
The above bug is a bug that MIT knew about in the R2 server (I think
it has to do with byte swapping). Most of the bugs that cause the
server to crash into the debugger are invalid C code that the
Symbolics environment catches: calling functions with the wrong number
of arguments (the compiler can't detect these when the call is through
a function pointer); accessing uninitialized structure components (the
code frequently passes structures that aren't fully initialized to
routines that try to swap bytes, and it dies when it tries to swap the
bytes of an uninitialized component). One bug turned out to be a
Symbolics C compiler bug; it mis-compiles "foo = bar = baz", so foo
doesn't get the correct value; this caused deleted windows to stay on
the screen.
As I mentioned, most of the serious bugs are being fixed by the
patches that will be distributed soon. We had been holding off paying
Symbolics for the product contingent on these bug fixes, and I sent
the order in last week. It's not perfect, but it's usable now (I'm
using it at this very moment to read news and to compose this message
in GNU Emacs).
Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.
barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmarYork@chuck-jones.ila-west.dialnet.symbolics.COM (William M. York) (03/22/89)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 89 07:25:22 EST
From: rws@expo.lcs.mit.edu (Bob Scheifler)
Has anyone tried out the X server for Symbolics' from ILA?
I played around with an early version at my Symbolics rep's
and was disappointed. It seemed pretty buggy.
Yes, I bought it and have tried it, and I would probably have been less
charitable than you. It's pretty hard to believe they call it a product. E.g.
causing an xterm to scroll by typing carriage return will crash the server.
The important component of the Symbolics X product is the "remote
screen" client program. The preliminary release of the X Server (a
direct port of the "sample server" to Symbolics C) was included to fill
a gap in the customers' set of available tools. It was intended to
assist in the debugging of CLX programs being developed on the Lisp
Machine, not as a serious X Server for Genera, and was documented as
such. We have gotten substantial QA feedback, and most of the known
bugs are fixed and the fixes will be distributed on the next Symbolics
software ECO tape, which is currently in preparation.
Most of the blowouts are due to the Symbolics C compiler being stricter
than those used in the Unix world. There are several places where
uninitialized storage is referenced (e.g. the event structure
byte-swapping code), or functions are called with too many arguments
(but via dispatch vectors which defeat compile-time checking) and
Symbolics C generates errors in these cases.
Overall, when you include the bugfixes, I think that the server does
quite well for a C program that has been uprooted and transplanted into
a Lisp environment!rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) (04/04/89)
From: rws@expo.lcs.mit.edu (Bob Scheifler)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 89 07:25:22 EST
Has anyone tried out the X server for Symbolics' from ILA?
I played around with an early version at my Symbolics rep's
and was disappointed. It seemed pretty buggy.
Yes, I bought it and have tried it, and I would probably have been less
charitable than you. It's pretty hard to believe they call it a product.
E.g. causing an xterm to scroll by typing carriage return will crash the
server.
I've received patches from ILA that improves the server considerably. Although
the server is still slow, it now appears to be quite usable for it's intended
purpose (which is to debug X clients). The clients that we tried now seem to
work correctly. I'm told that Symbolics should be releasing these patches in
the (hopefully near) future.