SGI: Development

Does IRIX always come with a C compiler and Motif toolkit development files, or would it be better to use the Nekoware GCC and GTK+?

Well the Motif toolkit is available for free under the LGPL. Whether or not you should use it is a matter of personal choice.

IRIX has MIPSPro, which is no longer sold by SGI, but it is often available secondhand ( not here though, note the orange warning in the for sale sections ) and via other means. Its by far preferable for programs to be built under MIPSPro, but in some modern programs like Firefox, as far as I know its not really an option.

TeamBlackFox wrote: Well the Motif toolkit is available for free under the LGPL. Whether or not you should use it is a matter of personal choice.

IRIX 6.5 comes with Motif 1.2.x and 2.1.x preinstalled

GTK 2.x is very slow on IRIX because it assumes certain Xorg extensions and is real slow if it doesn't find them.

jan-jaap wrote: GTK 2.x is very slow on IRIX because it assumes certain Xorg extensions and is real slow if it doesn't find them.

So this is why Firefox has lag issues? In that case why not port NetSurf, Origyn Web Browser or some other modern browser? Origyn is available under the BSD licence, and while its rooted in the Amiga realm, shouldn't its lack of dependency on GTK+ make it easier to work with?

Firefox is slow because XUL is an interpreted language and the interpreter is s l o w . . .

I hadn't heard that about GTK being slow because of needing X extensions, are those extensions hard to build on IRIX? I've never tried to compile an X extension before, but according to jwz in the X Windows Disaster chapter of the Unix Haters Handbook, chewing on broken glass might be a better use of your time.

Browser-wise I've got a side project to get a 3+ version of Dillo going on IRIX.

No. Firefox is slow because JavaScript is an interpreted language and the interpreter is slow. XUL is actually pretty efficient as far as markup goes, even without a true native widget toolkit.

I'd rather have NetSurf than Origyn, but that comes from my long-standing anti-WebKit bias, which is abating a bit now that Google has Blink to take over the world with instead.

Why the anti-webkit bias? I don't care for Safari myself, but I think its a little unfair to judge a rendering engine.

Otherwise, Classic, since you already maintain two firefox forks, could you find some time in your busy schedule to help us fellow IRIX fellows out? (I'm half joking if you don't catch the sarcasm)

ClassicHasClass wrote: No. Firefox is slow because JavaScript is an interpreted language and the interpreter is slow.

One thing that is a big help with Fireflop is to set up a proxy, then block the thousands of bullshit javascripts running in the background. It's pretty easy to do and makes a significant improvement. This works even better if several people are using one innernut connection.

HttpFox works in 3.0.19 and is a big help at rooting out quantserve and other worthless slowth-inducing b.s.

Turning off javascript also works but it can be a pain when some fool uses javascript to write simple buttons where static html would do better.

Now some places I go I see lines and lines of pretty red 403 hits scrolling by in the httpfox window, while the page loads quickly

TeamBlackFox wrote: Why the anti-webkit bias? I don't care for Safari myself, but I think its a little unfair to judge a rendering engine.

Because monocultures are inherently inbred and are exceptionally vulnerable to plague or unfavorable recessive traits. Diversity equals resilience!

Donald_ET3 wrote: Does IRIX always come with a C compiler and Motif toolkit development files, or would it be better to use the Nekoware GCC and GTK+?

If you want to use any current open source, I strongly recommend to use gcc 4.7. All current open source is written to be compiled with gcc. It's a real pain to port this software to be compiled with mipspro and it's not worth to spend time on it since the result is not much faster than the gcc code, in some cases it will be slower.

diegel wrote: All current open source is written to be compiled with gcc.

They have become the monster they despised.

Donald_ET3 wrote: Does IRIX always come with a C compiler and Motif toolkit development files, or would it be better to use the Nekoware GCC and GTK+?

A set of IRIX 6.5.x installation disks always comes with Motif 1.2.x and 2.1.x libraries. If memory serves IRIX 6.5.30 ships with Motif 1.2.4 and Motif 2.1.32. Stock IRIX does not provide a C compiler with a working C/C++ front-end.

If you do not have access to MIPSpro you will need something else. In most cases that something else will be GCC. Because it's just there and because you dont want to suffer GCC-ism headaches. That said, in my experience 'portable' code these days means: GCC will probably compile your code on some Intel or ARM-based GNU/Linux distro. Other build-targets probably wont work unless you port the 'portable' code.

As to GTK+. Yes, it's used by the GIMP and Firefox and some other major projects but I'm sure that given the chance they would all be using something else. If you want to keep you code portable to Linux/FreeBSD I guess GTK+ is one way of doing it, but it's going to be painful on IRIX.

If you do end up coding with Motif on IRIX, probably because you want to stay true to the classic IRIX look-and-feel, you really want to look into using ViewKit. ViewKit is a C++/Motif application development framework that comes with IRIX. It takes away a lot of the pain of developing with Motif but like any other framework it does mean you have to code in The One True ViewKit Way.

Unfortunately, the MIPSpro-compiled stock IRIX ViewKit runtime cannot be linked with your GCC-generated objects because the MIPSpro and GCC compilers have different internal C++ name-mangeling schemes. There is an OpenSource clone of ViewKit called 'ViewKlass' which you could compile with GCC and thus circumvent the name-mangeling issue, but it's only 90-95% feature complete as it lacks some of the more advanced ViewKit widgets.

Bottom-line: If you want your application to fit in with the classic IRIX Indigo Magic Desktop look-and-feel then you have to go with SGI Motif. If you're going to code with SGI Motif you really want to look into ViewKit. If you want to use stock IRIX ViewKit you can only use MIPSpro. If you do some homework and figuring-outing you might also be able to use GCC in combination with ViewKlass.

Either way, I for one would love to see somebody else joining me in writing the odd bit of Motif-on-IRIX stuff

Good luck!

J.

commodorejohn wrote:

TeamBlackFox wrote: Why the anti-webkit bias? I don't care for Safari myself, but I think its a little unfair to judge a rendering engine.

Because monocultures are inherently inbred and are exceptionally vulnerable to plague or unfavorable recessive traits. Diversity equals resilience!

You took the words right out of my mouth. I despise monocultures. We cursed Trident for this back in the day, remember.

I see what you mean then I guess. I love Gecko, but making a non-GTK port of Firefox would entail a lot of work, I don't know if we have anyone here willing to take it on. And I'd much prefer a newer Firefox, slow as it will be, to Netsurf because of licencing, which we won't get into.

For a short time ICS did market a Linux variant of Viewkit in the 90s. As far as I know I'm the only person that bought one. Too bad because it really is an outstanding application development framework. I think, but am not sure, that Eric Masson (of 5Dwm) has the source code, but I don't think SGI ever let him release anything but binaries...

>5DWM

Its a shame that it seems under such lock and key I can't run it on BSD - I'd like my Raspi and whatever desktop replacement I get to match the rest of my fleet.

TeamBlackFox wrote: I see what you mean then I guess. I love Gecko, but making a non-GTK port of Firefox would entail a lot of work, I don't know if we have anyone here willing to take it on. And I'd much prefer a newer Firefox, slow as it will be, to Netsurf because of licencing, which we won't get into.

You'd have to port widget/, at least, and then you'd need some way of handling native controls. It's doable, but as you say, non-trivial.

What's wrong with NetSurf's license? It's GPLv2, so no worse than GPL ordinarily ...

ClassicHasClass wrote: XUL is actually pretty efficient as far as markup goes, even without a true native widget toolkit.

I don't know, libxul in Firefox 31 is amost 60 megabytes, even for the crazy-ass up-is-down world of mozilla that seems a bit out there. The best part of mozilla AFAICT is NSPR, the Netscape Portable Runtime, and that was pretty much feature complete when Netscape dumped the mozilla project onto the unsuspecting Internet in April 1998...

libxul isn't just xul, though. It's virtually *everything* -- NSPR, XPCOM, layout, content, DOM, the compositor, NPAPI, JavaScript, docshell, appshell, you name it. The actual portion of layout/content that handles XUL is a relatively small portion. Only a few glue libraries live outside of libxul mostly so that the JS shell doesn't have to be linked against the whole damn thing.

You could make the argument that XUL is not much good without everything else, but there's nothing preventing someone from making a competing implementation; nobody bothered. I think it's more instructive to look at things like Camino and K-Meleon, which were essentially Gecko without XUL, and the delta in code size compared to the contemporary 3.6 was not large (even considering that they were swapping a JavaScript-based browser front end for a Objective-C/C++ one).

Man, K-Meleon. For a while there I almost used that as my main browser, until stuff just stopped working with it. Looks like it's finally updating again, though...