Is this sending rendered images as binary over websocket and then into a HTML5 canvas? Or is there something especially clever going on?
The Broadway Windowing System
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#12Wait, does this mean I can use any spare tablet, laptop or smart TV as second monitor for, say M1 running Asahi? Wonder what's the performance for non-game usage?
You can also use VNC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#13Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172377 (241 comments)
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#14I remember when Alex Larsson announced this as a POC. I tried it out, it was pretty neat and worked well. I was always sad it kind of languished or didn't get any attention after that.
So I'm curious, is it back with a vengeance? Are people working on this?
See here from 2010: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/ More here in GTK4: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2019/03/29/broadway-adventures...
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#15Wait, does this mean I can use any spare tablet, laptop or smart TV as second monitor for, say M1 running Asahi? Wonder what's the performance for non-game usage?
You can also use VNC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing
can a VNC client acts as an additional display?
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#16I remember when Alex Larsson announced this as a POC. I tried it out, it was pretty neat and worked well. I was always sad it kind of languished or didn't get any attention after that. So I'm curious, is it back with a vengeance? Are people working on this? See here from 2010: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/ More here in GTK4: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2019/03/29/broadway-adventures...
I'd be interested to know this too but I'm not hopeful. I imagine it's up here because it was mentioned in the discussion on the New renderers for GTK[0] post a couple of days ago.
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#17Qt supports this too: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/webgl.html I've used this to let friends on IRC paint on my LED shelf ( https://github.com/eikehein/hyelicht ), which has a Qt-based embedded and phone app GUI, over the internet. Cheap fun!
I think Qt's is "better", in that GTK's just streams pixel data to a HTML canvas. Looks like Qt actually streams the WebGL drawing commands to the browser, which does the rendering itself. Certainly that's still not super fast, as the drawing commands are sent over a socket, vs. directly to the GPU's GL driver... but presumably more performant than rendering in the app (even if using the GPU to do so), and then copying the pixel data into network buffers.
Either way, it's a cool feature in both toolkits. (Not trying to belittle GTK here.)
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#18Qt supports this too: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/webgl.html I've used this to let friends on IRC paint on my LED shelf ( https://github.com/eikehein/hyelicht ), which has a Qt-based embedded and phone app GUI, over the internet. Cheap fun!
I think Qt's is "better", in that GTK's just streams pixel data to a HTML canvas. Looks like Qt actually streams the WebGL drawing commands to the browser, which does the rendering itself. Certainly that's still not super fast, as the drawing commands are sent over a socket, vs. directly to the GPU's GL driver... but presumably more performant than rendering in the app (even if using the GPU to do so), and then copyi…
AFAIU for 'heavy' 3D applications like AAA games the BW over the PCIe bus to the GPU can be a lot higher than what comes out of the cable to the screen. So just sending (compressed) pixels is not necessarily a bad remoting strategy.
Though for something simple like just rendering GUI widgets the opposite may very well be true.
Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#19Re: The Broadway Windowing System
#20When I tried it, I couldn't figure out how to make it non-blurry.