Re: [9front] Thoughts on Wayland?

[ori@eigenstate.org]

Quoth Willow Liquorice <willow@howhill.com>:
> Hello again 9front,
> 
> (Warning: long email is long)
> 
> I've been leafing through the Wayland protocol, comparing it to rio and 
> /dev/draw. To me, a system that could speak Wayland sounds much more 
> compatible with the wider software ecosystem.
> 

A system that fully implements the posix APIs would also be more
compatible with the wider software ecosystem, however it would not
be more pleasant to program for or interact with; The appeal of
Plan 9 is that it's simplified things to the essentials, and
doesn't pull in a bunch of overengineered junk.

So, as for Wayland specifically: The biggest problem with it is
that it's not a protocol. It's got a core that's insufficient for
actual use, and a set of mutually incompatible extensisons that
forces each user to write programs that explicitly support wlroots,
gnome, and KDE with separate hacks. To pick on an example, cursor
warping in drawterm only works in some environments, because others
fail to support those specific extensisons.

On top of that, the protocol's model of resources is rather
overengineered and painful to use.

More or less, Wayland was misdesigned on different axes than X11;
it's not clear which one is a worse approach.

However, Wayland is clearly a worse fit for Plan 9 than devdraw;
it's designed for the case where not only does the GPU live on the
same machine as the compositor, it's designed for the case where
every single piece of software doing drawing lives on the same
machine as well.