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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

#121

Post by socketcluster »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #118
socketcluster wrote: post #116

The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before. It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name. Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...

From the ashes of some previous project is born some new project . It's symbolic. I remember people naming new software projects this back in the 1980s for the same reason.

It's a great name but way overused. I guess everything these days rose from ashes of past failures. Sector is highly competitive.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#122

Post by nish__ »

quantummagic wrote: post #97
nish__ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need What's missing?

Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.

lol

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#123

Post by wakawaka28 »

socketcluster wrote: post #116

The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before. It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name. Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...

Firefox tried to use it and was sued for trademark infringement. wxPython also has a Phoenix project. It's definitely a catchy, but overused, name.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#124

Post by LeFantome »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #123
socketcluster wrote: post #116

The name Phoenix is overused. There is an Elixir framework called Phoenix. I think I also heard of other projects with that same name before. It's a bit like the name 'Apollo'; besides the moon landing project, I know like 2 dev projects called that and also there is a sales SaaS platform with that name. Surely people should run a search first before choosing a name...

Firefox tried to use it and was sued for trademark infringement. wxPython also has a Phoenix project. It's definitely a catchy, but overused, name.

I don’t think the problem was with “phoenix”.

It was Project Phoenix (resurrection of the Netscape browser). This resulted in the Firebird browser (Firebird and Thunderbird). But Firebird was an existing database that objected to the name. So, we got Firefox instead.

At least that is how I remember it.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#125

Post by LeFantome »

sho_hn wrote: post #11

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.

A lot of people would have preferred this to Wayland if it had come much earlier.

If it also runs Wayland apps, many may prefer it actually.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#126

Post by sho_hn »

yepguy wrote: post #106
shevy-java wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day. You two here don't mention any of the reasons. It is hard to discuss this when there are no specifics, so what was needed, and what was not added?

The 3 justifications I remember for Wayland were security (isolating windows from each other), multi DPI, and eliminating tearing. All are now features of XLibre.

This is all playing a bit fast and loose with the details.

The "isolating windows from each other" stuff in Xlibre for example is the Xnamespace extension, which requires a static config file up front and lets X clients within the namespace interact as before. This may have some utility for specific scenarios (dunno, kiosks maybe?), but is nothing like Wayland's default security model.

Similarly, enabling TearTree in the modesetting driver and having another backbuffer in the driver is a huge crutch vs. having a proper architecture where the compositor can own presentation timing. For one it makes adaptive sync/VRR a lot trickier.

These things are overall not equivalent.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#127

Post by dismalaf »

vidarh wrote: post #47
sho_hn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.

For the server/compositor. Not for the client, or if you want to write a wm and is forced to write a compositor. And actually I'm not even even convinced about the server if talking about a minimal server like this that insists on DRI/GBM, and ditches all the old rendering cruft.

So build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#128

Post by LeFantome »

vidarh wrote: post #47
sho_hn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.

For the server/compositor. Not for the client, or if you want to write a wm and is forced to write a compositor. And actually I'm not even even convinced about the server if talking about a minimal server like this that insists on DRI/GBM, and ditches all the old rendering cruft.

Well, you are not really forced to write a compositor these days as there are libraries that do all the heavy lifting for you.

Check out Louvre for example. Or Smithay if you like Rust. And if you want a bit more depth, there is wlroots of course (or the hyprland version). It is not really any harder than writing an X11 WM.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#129

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bigyabai wrote: post #78
vidarh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no, the X11 devs made pretty much all the wrong tradeoffs for me.

I wonder why Valve disagrees.

Valve ships a Wayland compositor that just runs XWayland for apps and doesn't even expose the Wayland socket by default. I'm really not sure how we're supposed to count that.

Re: Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

#130

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

glzone1 wrote: post #51
sho_hn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/ If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that b…

Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc. For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I…

> Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc.

> [...]

> By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

So it's a great analogy. Wayland started out proudly proclaiming that it intentionally didn't support features in the name of "security" but everyone should "upgrade" because this was totally better, and has been very slowly discovering that actually all the stuff it willfully dropped was useful and has mostly evolved back to near feature parity with Xorg.

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