LCA: Updates on the X Window System

LCA: Updates on the X Window System

It also means -- and this is a biggie -- that you don't need to maintain forward/backward compatibility (no ABIs or APIs to maintain). If there's a change you want to make, you just MAKE it. Add RCU? No problem. It's wonderful.

This is why there's so little cruft in the Linux source tree (or, more accurately, the little cruft that's there is baked in so hard that it takes major surgery to get it out). This is quite unlike the Windows DDK which has grown into a massive hairy monster as Microsoft was forced to ensure that old drivers and new drivers alike could call into the same API.

I really hope the X devs choose to use the kernel model. Otherwise they're likely to get bogged down in API management and development will be slower than it should be.