I was mainly curious about the performance hit of drawing operations. But your subjective assessment is enough to understand that the penalty is lower than I expected.
A lot of drawing on linux already goes over a "file", a PF_UNIX socket from the application to the X server - with the added penalty of making an additional round trip to the kernel, whilst on Plan 9 you just go directly to the kernel(as long as the application and display is running locally)
How does that work? Does Plan 9 run the display in the kernel?
Also communication with the X server can use shared memory - AIUI the modern GUI toolkits render everything to buffers themselves rather than using X drawing protocol calls, so I suspect drawing on modern linux is mostly a shared-memory thing.
Yes, it runs in the kernel on Plan 9. And sure, these days there's various optimzation using shared memory for a lot of the gfx or going via OpenGL when using X11.
I'm just saying unixes have done it a similar way to Plan 9 since almost forever - and it's not that big of a deal.
I can try to run some form of rudimentary benchmark tomorrow and I'll try to get back to this thread if I can.
As for drawing. Plan9 is intended to be used graphically. Although the interface is by majority text (which is very handy). Images and window usage in general is as run of the mill as would be expected in a graphical environment.
