Thoughts on Smithhay 0.2

Thoughts on Smithhay 0.2

[Timidger]

As I said in the blog post:

I have decided to use wlroots

I have put considerable effort into making safe Rust bindings to wlroots. The effort is still ongoing, but I'm convinced it's better since wlroots is becoming the standard.

"Pure Rust" is not a feature I'm particularly interested in. Working damage tracking, multi output layout, plug and play for standard protocols, a good standard Xwayland implementation, (and the many other features it has which I won't bother listing) are much more important.

So far you can write "pure Rust" when using wlroots-rs but if a little C glue code is necessary then I don't consider that a bug (e.g. I foresee custom protocols requiring C code, but that is more due to wayland-rs restrictions than wlroots restrictions)

Thanks for replying so quickly! I see, I thought your stance would be sticking with wlroots given how much time you've invested in it, I was more curious on your thought of it being a viable options and if you'd make the same decision if smithay's current version was available in 2017 when you were deciding what compositor framework to use. I'm very interested in your project. I am looking into throwing Arch linux on an old laptop and making it use rust as much as possible using Way Cooler and coreutils rewrite. Thank you for making this.

[Timidger]

The velocity of wlroots and the velocity of smithay are very, very different.

A large part of this is that wlroots has more developers working on it. There are various reasons for this, but it doesn't really matter since the amount of work smithay must do to achieve its goals is > the amount of work wlroots must do to achieve it's goals.

So even if smithay started at the point it's at now I would still pitch my tent in wlroots' camp. Because smithay has declared it wants to RiiR everything I'm not interested.

[AdminXVII]

@FriedPandaFries If you want truly to be as much Rust as possible and don't need every tool out there, you might want to try Redox. It is a UNIX-inspired micro-kernel (not POSIX compliant so you might have some problems with some packages) written entirely with Rust. It works pretty well at the moment though it is limited with hardware support.