re x design choice for color handling question in article lu oftinnnfk cascais cs utexas edu sirosh cs utexas edu joseph sirosh writes why did x designers decide to not associate the color with the object being drawn and instead associate it with the display it is being drawn on in x the drawing attributes were bundled into drawing requests that is the server s drawing model was stateless this caused problems with performance and network traffic so the x redesign included the graphic context to codify the drawing state most application designers who want to draw things in several different colors create a gc for each color during initialization then pass the gc id in each drawing request for more information see scheifler and gettys s article in the acm transactions on graphics
