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This article seems to be mixing up languages, which others have pointed out but not in full. wayland-rs does not wrap libwayland, but instead offers a pure Rus

This article seems to be mixing up languages, which others have pointed out but not in full. wayland-rs does not wrap libwayland, but instead offers a pure Rust implementation of the Wayland protocol. Sway and wlroots are both written in C, but wlroots-rs is a project which wraps the wlroots C library in a Rust wrapper. There are currently no mature Wayland compositors written in Rust. Also, this article mainly focuses on the problems with Wayland on the Raspberry Pi, which stem mainly from the old proprietary drivers and the slow pace at which Raspbian gets up-to-date software. For most users, the experience is much better.

floatboth 8y ago
> wayland-rs does not wrap libwayland, but instead offers a pure Rust implementation of the Wayland protocol Originally it only wrapped libwayland. Now it offers both libwayland and a pure Rust implementation, togglable with the Cargo features client_native and server_native.
stefan_ 8y ago
The irony of the Raspberry Pi in particular is that while the ARM side has seen multiple order of magnitude jumps in performance, the GPU and compositor hardware have of course remained at its original 2009 atrocious level. The result is that the CPU drawing on a screen-sized framebuffer is fast enough that Raspbian will probably never, ever make the jump to full bells-and-whistles mainline VC4 drawing and atomic DRM composition. It would just end up using a lot more memory and break a bunch of hacks in the proprietary drivers that people have come to rely on for essentially still garbage tier performance and a system that randomly freezes because you ran out of graphics memory (which is forever limited to 256 MiB, memory that you surrender on boot to the horrendous CMA system). I like the Pi a lot as a PoC platform given the availability and the fully open-source supported driver we have for it. But the HW specifications of all the parts that Wayland cares about make it very clear that the thing was only ever meant to do 1080P when you are piping frames from the video decode engine straight to the compositor and out the pixel valves.

floatboth 8y ago

> wayland-rs does not wrap libwayland, but instead offers a pure Rust implementation of the Wayland protocol Originally it only wrapped libwayland. Now it offers both libwayland and a pure Rust implementation, togglable with the Cargo features client_native and server_native.

stefan_ 8y ago

The irony of the Raspberry Pi in particular is that while the ARM side has seen multiple order of magnitude jumps in performance, the GPU and compositor hardware have of course remained at its original 2009 atrocious level. The result is that the CPU drawing on a screen-sized framebuffer is fast enough that Raspbian will probably never, ever make the jump to full bells-and-whistles mainline VC4 drawing and atomic DRM composition. It would just end up using a lot more memory and break a bunch of hacks in the proprietary drivers that people have come to rely on for essentially still garbage tier performance and a system that randomly freezes because you ran out of graphics memory (which is forever limited to 256 MiB, memory that you surrender on boot to the horrendous CMA system). I like the Pi a lot as a PoC platform given the availability and the fully open-source supported driver we have for it. But the HW specifications of all the parts that Wayland cares about make it very clear that the thing was only ever meant to do 1080P when you are piping frames from the video decode engine straight to the compositor and out the pixel valves.