Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
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Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#2Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server.
How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#3Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server. How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
We are in a bubble and it's not overrated. Many people just have issues using it correctly it seems. Weird as after 30 years managing 1000s of programmers over that time, this feels the same, yet with many times more and often better output.
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#4Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server. How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
>How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
Simple: AI is not overrated at all. Might still be a bubble though, that's an entirely different consideration.
Something is still holding us back though. One would think that we'd have a dozen total rewrites of Linux at this point.
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#5eww
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#6Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server. How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
> How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
The dot com boom in 1999 was a bubble, but the internet was still useful and important and obviously survived.
The bubble is due to the skyrocketing valuations and questionable financial future of the companies involved, not because AI isn’t useful.
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#7I 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?
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#8I 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.
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#9Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server. How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
It's an undertaking, but there were multiple X servers for small platforms back in the day - the difficulty is overstated. It takes a few thousand lines of code to get a basic one together.
Maintaining Xorg might be unreasonably hard.
But I agree with you LLMs are amazing at this - I had Claude throw a half baked one together in less than 24h.
Re: Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support
#10Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server. How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?
>How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble? Simple: AI is not overrated at all. Might still be a bubble though, that's an entirely different consideration. Something is still holding us back though. One would think that we'd have a dozen total rewrites of Linux at this point.
Hobby OSs are dime a dozen but rarely go further for the simple reason that there is little motivation - you need programs to run, which typically means ABI compatibility, and you end up in a quagmire of writing drivers, with few benefits to show for it that you can't get by building something on top of an existing kernel instead.