Re: [xmonad] bringing xmonad into the threaded world

On Mon, 07 May 2012 10:28:32 -0400 wagnerdm@seas.upenn.edu wrote:

Quoting Mike Meyer :

...

Why is it silly? It's not like the overhead of starting a new process is going to be anything but noise compared to recompiling the configuration file. Perhaps silly is the wrong word. But:

Because it means any time I want to do something with X, but keep xmonad's response time snappy, I have to create a process, make sure that process is in xmonad's PATH with all the confusing debugging associated with that (some people on #xmonad actually didn't have xmonad in their $PATH!), figure out how to do IPC...

Ah, it's doing a spawn() instead of a simple fork() to run code in the existing process. I agree, that's silly. After a quick glance at the patch, it should mostly work if you use a real OS fork instead of a forkIO (because you're still doing IPC via the X server), and also have the nifty protected address space that comes with using a modern facility instead of threading. http://www.mired.org/ Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org