I have liked the idea of NeWS for a very long time. Sadly NeWS was born and died long before it was viable: postscript has always been difficult to write a VM for and unfriendly to application programmers, machines were significantly slower, and NeWS itself was very much vendor-locked.
However, things are different now. We could embed Lua or WASM into the display server, and you'd have a much more programmer-friendly platform that can run efficiently enough to feel snappy. We have more memory, so you don't need to share toolkits between applications.
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I have liked the idea of NeWS for a very long time. Sadly NeWS was born and died long before it was viable: postscript has always been difficult to write a VM for and unfriendly to application programmers, machines were significantly slower, and NeWS itself was very much vendor-locked.
However, things are different now. We could embed Lua or WASM into the display server, and you'd have a much more programmer-friendly platform that can run efficiently enough to feel snappy. We have more memory, so you don't need to share toolkits between applications.
Maybe it's time to revive the concept.