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Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

isene.org

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Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#91

Post by ptx »

vidarh wrote: post #31
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…

Yeah, I have a mostly-functioning X11 server in Ruby, myself (not anywhere public yet). Isene and I have relatively similar philosophies on this, except I have Claude burning tokens on optimizing and fixing my Ruby compiler now because I still want things in a high-level language, and my entire stack is Ruby instead of asm. But I love what he's doing - I just don't love x86 asm... Turns out a functioning X server is…

Wasn't a lot of the protocol encoded in XML as part of libxcb? Could that be used to generate the tedious code for the X server?

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#92

Post by inigyou »

edumucelli wrote: post #34
gen2brain wrote: post #29

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.

OMG, yes, please, get rid of all those composers, all that mess that people are doing. X11 is 40 years of battle testing. Wayland in 22 years (it already has 18) will be 100x worse than X11. A Dockbar I am working on https://github.com/edumucelli/docking/ is a pain to build on Wayland. It already supports a lot of composers and even mutter/gnome with that Gnome shell extension, but at what cost ...

Wayland is designed not to support all that stuff. If you're going to reimplement X in Wayland you might as well just use X.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#94

Post by inigyou »

shevy-java wrote: post #37

> The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. Working on it: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver And they also deleted old code too. A lot of the old code could probably be removed, but is it really that relevant whether you have 4 millions line of code or 2 million lines of code? C is in my opinion too overbose.…

The biggest problem with Xorg refactoring is that the entire surface area, every non-static function, is module API and there are closed-source modules everyone relies on (mostly Nvidia).

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#95

Post by inigyou »

tcmart14 wrote: post #36
cogman10 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is where looking at the gaming centric distros and doing what they do makes sense. I haven't seen all kernel settings for all distros, but my understanding is many choose the defaults and most of the defaults are more optimized for server usage. Which makes sense. Debian's biggest deployment environment is a fleet of servers. For the standard Debian Install, of course. However, my laptop is not a server, so the…

The beauty of open source is that you can be the change you want to see in the world.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#96

Post by elcritch »

shevy-java wrote: post #37

> The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. Working on it: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver And they also deleted old code too. A lot of the old code could probably be removed, but is it really that relevant whether you have 4 millions line of code or 2 million lines of code? C is in my opinion too overbose.…

Nim gives me similar performance to C++ in generally half the LOC.

For example I had Codex port Kiwi Cassowary C++ to Nim: https://github.com/elcritch/kiwiberry

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#97

Post by Yokohiii »

dlojudice wrote: post #43

How many times have people posted here about how software is no longer optimized because CPUs keep evolving, making programmers lazy? It seems things have changed. The question is: will LLMs manage to squeeze the most out of this hardware, better than compilers do? In the few tests I’ve run, yes, a lot.

For that to happen people have to prompt for it. Usually they already struggle to get basic stuff done.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#98

Post by vidarh »

ptx wrote: post #91
vidarh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a mostly-functioning X11 server in Ruby, myself (not anywhere public yet). Isene and I have relatively similar philosophies on this, except I have Claude burning tokens on optimizing and fixing my Ruby compiler now because I still want things in a high-level language, and my entire stack is Ruby instead of asm. But I love what he's doing - I just don't love x86 asm... Turns out a functioning X server is…

Wasn't a lot of the protocol encoded in XML as part of libxcb? Could that be used to generate the tedious code for the X server?

Yes, you're right.

There are other tedious bits too, like all of the details around exactly how to propagate which events, but the protocol encoding is certainly one of the most tedious bits.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#99

Post by cassianoleal »

bogwog wrote: post #51

> I wrote my own I see the growing trend of words losing all meaning is still going strong in 2026. I wonder what human communication will look like in the near future?

I already see a lot of people say they've "read" a certain book when they mean they listened to the audiobook instead.

Re: Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

#100

Post by yndoendo »

cassianoleal wrote: post #99
bogwog wrote: post #51

> I wrote my own I see the growing trend of words losing all meaning is still going strong in 2026. I wonder what human communication will look like in the near future?

I already see a lot of people say they've "read" a certain book when they mean they listened to the audiobook instead.

Words matter to me. This why I say "consumed" vs read. Audiobooks are great for walks and long car drives.
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