The Xt intrinsics as a general purpose application development platform or a user interface toolkit with optional users

Many graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits provide an event-driven framework which dispatches control to specific pieces of code based on an event stream, such as mouse clicks or keystrokes. These toolkits have incorporated utilities into their main loops for dealing with synthetic timers, I/O multiplexing, and idle procedures. Other real world problems fit this event-driven model quite well; database servers, communications line handlers, and interpreter front ends, to name a few. With only a few exceptions, we've found the Xt Intrinsics to be an ideal platform for building a distributed real-time[1] market data system, especially the non-GUI portions[2], despite the fact that this toolkit was principally designed to be used as a GUI toolkit. This paper describes our success with this approach and the limitations we encountered.