Silly comparison between W1R4 and X11R5

First of all, W and X are intended (or have evolved) for slightly different purposes. X is a heavy-weight networked graphics system whereas W is a intended to be small, simple and fairly portable. If you have monochrome graphics where video memory is located into normal RAM (Atari/Amiga), W is a bit faster than X. It's main goal is to be easy to program for though.

Window managers

Window redraws

Messages

Graphics subsystem

As X is older, widely used and commercially supported, it understandably supports graphics hardware (better), has more complete graphics contexts and function sets. W graphics functions have the following deficiencies at the moment:

W has also a couple of things which X lacks:

X11 features missing from W1R4

X11R5 features missing from W1R4:

Later X11 versions have these additional features:

W1R4 and X11R5 size difference

On MiNT, the statically linked monochrome W server is 100KB and X11R5 500KB. When running, W server uses about 300KB and X11 900KB of RAM. Statically linked Wlib binaries are about 50-90KB, Xlib ones 120-300KB, W Toolkit ones 100-200KB and Athena widget set ones 400-800KB. With shared libraries the library sizes won't matter that much though.
oak@welho.com