alt Hacker NewsI don't understand the desire for an X11 rewrite. X.org is absolutely terrible, I understand starting from scratch, but wouldn't it make far more sense to make a backwards compatible X12?
I don't understand the desire for an X11 rewrite. X.org is absolutely terrible, I understand starting from scratch, but wouldn't it make far more sense to make a backwards compatible X12?
I actually started an "x12" in Ruby (yes...)
It took Claude less than a day to get it to the point where Firefox runs and plays YouTube videos at decent speed - modern x apps does mostly client side rendering so the X11 server is rarely on the hot path.
And then I started backfilling a lot of things I initially didn't want, because it turns out it takes very little code and it's fun to get xterm, twm, xeyes working and not just modern clients.
There are bits I'll never add, or will do differently (e.g. TrueType server- side fonts instead of bitmaps because it's near trivial)
But done right the complexity even of the legacy drawing modes is pretty limited.
I've been a proponent of an 'x12' approach, but I'm less sure it makes sense now beyond very targeted deprecation, because I no longer believe it needs to add much complexity.
I'm not sure how far I'll take my x11 server - it was pretty much done on a whim -, but at the moment it's rendering to an x11 window and I want to at least make it render to a gbm/dri backend for the sake of it - it won't be all that hard.
What I've learnt is that the difficulty of writing an x11 server is vastly overstated - you can do a basic one in a few thousand lines of code in any high level language.