[erik_seaberg]

Waypipe ships client-rendered images across the network; datacenters would fall back to software rendering because there’s no way to take advantage of a user’s desktop GPU. I think the industry will continue moving to Javascript or Wasm apps as the most widely portable and accelerated remote display system we have.

[andrewshadura]

> Waypipe ships client-rendered images across the network

That's also exactly what most modern GUI toolkits do when they run on X11.

[WalterGR]

Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but... why would X11 toolkits need to ship client-rendered images across the network?

Doesn't the server tell the client what to render, and the rendering happens on the client? Why would that result then be shipped over the network?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

[andrewshadura]

Also, in X terminology, the server owns/controls the display, the client is the app that wants to draw a window on the server’s display. The classic architecture would be client telling server what to draw, but these days what really happens is that clients draw locally into a buffer and then tell X server to draw the contents of the buffer.

[andrewshadura]

That’s been tried, but most toolkits stopped doing that because it was unreliable, slow, and the number of primitives offered by X wasn’t sufficient for any modern GUI.