LCA: The ways of Wayland

Posted Feb 15, 2013 8:13 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: LCA: The ways of Wayland by nix
Parent article: LCA: The ways of Wayland

This is a bit of a daft comment from you, an otherwise well-informed commentator here. You surely must be well aware that:

a) Linux has shared libraries

b) In X11 applications *ALSO* _each_ "implement" their own remoting facility

c) X11 applications do this by using toolkit libraries, which link to libraries implementing X11.

d) There are at least 2 different libraries which implement X11, that are widely used.

The Wayland remoting is highly unlikely to be much different. Applications will link to a plethora of toolkits which will link to a smaller number of remoting libraries, which may implement a potentially smaller number again of actual remoting protocols.

Just like how X11 is supported in applications today.

Bizarre answer

Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:32 UTC (Fri) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

Hum, the way I see it is your reply which is daft, nix is pointing out a particular use case (remote text rendering) where XRender may significantly outperform Wayland, and that this may become an issue, what's so daft about it?

As for me, I'll wait and see: on the paper XRender is much better for remote text rendering (an important use case), but X's implementation is so old and full of warts, that I think measurements are needed before implementing workaround on top of Wayland.

LCA: The ways of Wayland

Posted Feb 15, 2013 18:06 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

True. I never really thought of it like that, but libX11 is indeed a library implementation of the client side of the X protocol. I think the key is that it does nothing else (well, actually it does, too much else, that's why XCB is slowly taking off).

I guess what I'm really hoping is that something like XCB turns up to permit toolkits to do exactly what XCB/Xlib currently permit, i.e. remoting without exchanging vast heaps of compressed bitmaps. The downside is that now the toolkits -- or someone -- have to write the server side as well, and that requires coordination between toolkits, which historically they have been bloody awful at (mostly due to Gtk's flaming NIH syndrome, as I understand it).

I suppose you could use X-on-Wayland and XCB/Xlib for that, but in that case I'm afraid I don't really see much benefit to Wayland at all, other than I suppose a really disruptive way to get code cleanliness (and it's not like you can ditch the X server if you're still running X-on-Wayland for a lot of your work). Perhaps that's because a lot of the important X apps I run, I run remotely, excepting konsoles and the occasional game, which as DRI2 users are talking directly to the graphics card *already* without any need for Wayland...