13 Sep
2017
13 Sep
'17
5:44 a.m.
Well, just to nitpick, I remember that much of SunView
was a library but it
relied on special device drivers with complicated ioctls and such. I don't
recall that it be easily separated from the OS.
My (fuzzy) memory was that you called library routines to do
rasterops, and they consulted with the specific frame buffer
hardware in a way that, to (mis)quote Dennis Ritchie, had:
unwarranted chumminess with the ... implementation
[see http://c-faq.com/struct/structhack.html for actual quote].
This meant if your rasterop was misbehaving, it could be a
bug in a driver, or in the hardware.
(I remember this from trying to chase down some weird rasterop
behavior, or some such.)
Chris