When I was in University, I remember our server room in the CS department had those massive/think books on X11 programming.
It’d be interesting to see a minimal X11 window manager vs a minimal Wayland composer. Although the compose is a lot more, correct? It’s not only the wm, but drawing/buffering to the screen right?
One out of many problems is that you can’t abstract away the window management details to a comparable set of mechanisms in the way shown in the article - coarse window management policies are encoded into the protocol (that’s the “shell”) and just the high level semantics of popup windows alone span reach into hundreds of lines of code.
When I was in University, I remember our server room in the CS department had those massive/think books on X11 programming.
It’d be interesting to see a minimal X11 window manager vs a minimal Wayland composer. Although the compose is a lot more, correct? It’s not only the wm, but drawing/buffering to the screen right?
One out of many problems is that you can’t abstract away the window management details to a comparable set of mechanisms in the way shown in the article - coarse window management policies are encoded into the protocol (that’s the “shell”) and just the high level semantics of popup windows alone span reach into hundreds of lines of code.
Someone reposted the link on HN, and there seems to have been a conversations just exactly about wayland/X11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17765851
@SirCmpwn posted an example of what a small window compositor could look like in Wayland https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/ae4d1cdcca97ffeb2c35f0878d75dc17
(Some commentary added at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774889 to explain why wlroots is used in the small wayland compositor)