Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.
Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
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Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#12First my mind went to Phoenix (elixir framework), then to X (twitter) before it clicked what this was actually about. Some very overloaded names
The meaning of 'X server' has been well-established for 30+ years.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#13This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need
An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#14If you are not going to implement X11 drawing ops and XRender (which I, and many others, still use heavily), what's even the point? Any 'modern' program that only does client-side rendering already supports Wayland. AFAIK GTK 3 doesn't even support DRI on X11 unless you somehow trick it into using the abandoned OpenGL Cairo backend, but that's not modern enough apparently.
Where do they say they're omitting drawing and xrender?
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#15This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!
I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really really bad comment. I've never heard of the framework you're talking about and I thought you were talking about the Firefox prototype.
Phoenix is a well known web app framework regardless of your ignorance of it.
It's still a silly comment. The Phoenix web framework is a little over a decade old, and there are many other tech things named Phoenix that pre-date it, even just within the web application space. I assume Apache Phoenix and the web framework have a lot more to be annoyed at each other for.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#17This is a really really bad name. There's already a Phoenix that is well known in tech. https://phoenixframework.org/ OP if you're the author I suggest you rename to avoid confusion. Don't name it Rails either haha!
This is a really really bad comment. I've never heard of the framework you're talking about and I thought you were talking about the Firefox prototype.
I don't have an opinion on the matter, but it's pretty popular. According to [1], Phoenix "was used extensively over the past year" by 2.4% of responders.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#18This is a really really bad name. There's already a Phoenix that is well known in tech. https://phoenixframework.org/ OP if you're the author I suggest you rename to avoid confusion. Don't name it Rails either haha!
This is a really really bad comment. I've never heard of the framework you're talking about and I thought you were talking about the Firefox prototype.
If you’re in software dev or frequent hn, how have you not heard of Phoenix? It is consistently voted as most loved web framework.
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#19If you are not going to implement X11 drawing ops and XRender (which I, and many others, still use heavily), what's even the point? Any 'modern' program that only does client-side rendering already supports Wayland. AFAIK GTK 3 doesn't even support DRI on X11 unless you somehow trick it into using the abandoned OpenGL Cairo backend, but that's not modern enough apparently.
Where do they say they're omitting drawing and xrender?
It talks about trimming 'legacy' features and specifically says they are omitting 'font-related' operations. That obviously means no useful core X11 application will work (unless you count xlogo and xeyes). Whether the XRender glyph cache mechanism is included is unclear. It also says only DRI is *currently* supported, but maybe that's incidental?
Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
#20> The compositor will get disabled … if the client runs a fullscreen application and disabled vsync in the application. This is interesting to me, why would vsync being enabled mean that the desktop compositor needs to stick around for a full screen app?
I imagine because vsync and triple buffering introduce latency.
There are cases like games where you don't want all that lag.