[SDL] SDL for applications?

[Mattias Engdegård]

>>>> SDL is pretty poorly suited for windowed GUIs.
>
>	On the contrary, it depends on the platform.
>	Using OpenGL for 2d applications can make for
>	beautiful, hardware accelerated, windowed GUI's.

beautiful != fast or useable. And over a network?

>	Raster, (of enlightenment fame), has hinted that
>	a future version of E may depend upon OpenGL support
>	to handle rendering.  Then again, Raster does live
>	in the fantasy land of VA. But I think you might
>	beable to see where I'm going.

I believe more in what I've seen from Keith Packard's work with a
Render extension, and another for translucent windows in X.

>	OpenGL draws your polygons = widgets, antialiased text,
>	etc, and all you have to do is worry about your event
>	loop, (which you'd have to do if you were writing 
>	raw X without the Gtk or Qt anyways :)

You still want a windowing system, a hierarchical rectangle manager,
low-bandwidth event handling, etc. And you would need openGL for that,
and probably accelerated 3d hardware

>>>> SDL is usually a disaster
>>>> across a network, way inferior to any GUI toolkit (even Qt).
>>>> I don't think this can be changed without bloating SDL.

>	This is purely a matter of RPC, the SDL needn't even
>	know about this.  Write a client/server app, install
>	the SDL on the client machines, and do all the processing
>	on storage on your cluster of servers in the back room.

that could be used as an argument against X11 as well. Why isn't
the Windows NT display system network transparent? It's purely a
matter of RPC... Some people think that the network-transparency
of X11 is a good thing anyway