Frame – Linux X server in Assembly • Hacker News Board

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#21

Post by bogdan » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #8

I am loving the shift from 'X11 is too big and messy to ever reimplement' to 'there are multiple wildly different X servers being built from scratch'. Also, has anyone run it successfully? I got as far as building and running with --display and then running `DISPLAY=:7 dwm` and `DISPLAY=:7 alacritty`, but I can't seem to focus the window to actually type. Given that the author posted a picture of the thing actually r…

Try running `tile` as a wm. I imagine it's not fully compliant to support dwm.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#22

Post by fhn » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #14

system7rocks wrote: post #3

Interesting. I've never quite found that Linux is more optimized on battery-powered machines for energy savings, even though supposedly there is a lot of room to tweak and optimize settings -- from selecting a low resource window manager/DE to turning off various services to switching up power management utilities. But this does seem like an approach that might produce that kind of fruit?

The really unfortunate thing about linux is the defaults tend to be not battery friendly. For example, I recently got another 1 hour out of my old laptop's battery because I didn't realize for the intel video card driver I needed to add some modprobe flags to get it to load up a firmware binary blob. Doing that enabled hardware video decoding, faster performance, and lower power usage. There's a bunch of setting like…

That's really sad to hear. I think it's just so much to configure for any human to take on. I'm going to run my system config through an LLM and have it optimize it for me see if that works.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#23

Post by elendilm » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

I wish mine had no fan too except me.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#24

Post by tty456 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #16

When first looking at the source code, I wondered why one would waste so much time to write 25k lines in raw assembly language, but then I saw that it was generated with Claude, for whom it does not matter much how expanded is the written text. If someone had written this program manually, the strategy would have been very different. With a good macro-assembler (and nasm is good enough) one should define a great numb…

Sounds like another prompt is in order to re-write the code

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#25

Post by fhn » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

Was browsing some of the other rust projects(https://isene.org/fe2o3/#tools) and https://github.com/isene/torii says "Mozilla removed Firefox's "Open network login page" banner". I'm on windows and still see the banner so don't know if this is true. Is the really true on Linux?

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#26

Post by spikk » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

I wonder if very cheap code generation will make software monocultures less relevant here. Because lots of incompatible devices is awful to work with, security stuff may also hurt

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#27

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

ToyKeeper wrote: post #13

It's funny to see someone using a LLM as a compiler, making it convert higher-level operations into assembly, instead of just using a compiler.

Eventually that will be the way, revenge of COBOL and 4GLs.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#28

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

Up voting as it kind of makes the point I believe in, regarding how this AI powered tooling eventually will land on.

COBOL and 4 GL dreams coming into reality.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#29

Post by gen2brain » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

I would like to see a similar project that fixes Wayland. Like, can someone vibe-code window positioning, add SSD to GNOME (damage was already done, but still), and add the ability to send events so you can automate and drive the app offscreen for testing.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#30

Post by kees99 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #16

When first looking at the source code, I wondered why one would waste so much time to write 25k lines in raw assembly language, but then I saw that it was generated with Claude, for whom it does not matter much how expanded is the written text. If someone had written this program manually, the strategy would have been very different. With a good macro-assembler (and nasm is good enough) one should define a great numb…

Claude has surprisingly good knowledge of X11 protocol.

The other day, colleague showed me a (pretty basic) terminal emulator written in one-shot by Opus. Kicker is - that was compiled to a 30 KB static binary. That's right. No libX11, no libXfont, not even libc.