7 ms·

Which is a mistake. On X11 the server, window manager and compositor are three separate programs. Both window manager and compositor can individually crash, sta

• ubercow13 6y ago
  On the other hand on X11, Xorg cannot crash without the X11 client instances being affected - a much larger chunk of code. It's only because Xorg is older that that doesn't happen much.
  • sprash 6y ago
    A chunk of code that is running in production for more than 30 years and should be considered battle tested. In my experience Wayland compositors crash much more often than X11 despite the supposed reduced complexity. The last time X11 server crashed on me was in 2004 if I remember correctly.
    • ubercow13 6y ago
      Exactly, that reliability of Xorg is a function of its age and doesn't imply anything about the correct design of a Wayland compositor. What's the chance those Wayland crashes were in the window management code rather than the rendering, protocol, clipboard, and drag/drop handling code? dwm is 2000 SLOC to Xorg's 1 million or so. I don't think splitting out the WM code would have gained much.
      • sprash 6y ago
        You underestimate the inherent complexity of Wayland. As exercise I recommend to implement a "Hello World" native Wayland client. Watch and see the complexity explode when you simply want to add the functionality to take screenshots to that client.
        • cycloptic 6y ago
          I'm not sure what kind of "Hello World" clients you're comparing, but if you check the Wayland backends in Gtk/Qt, you will actually find them to be smaller than the respective X11/XCB backends there, for various reasons.
          • sprash 6y ago
            I'm specifically not talking about toolkits. I'm talking about a "simple" native Wayland client. Try to write one and witness utter insanity.
            • cycloptic 6y ago
              Can you be more specific about what are you comparing this to? An X client with similar functionality would likely be longer and require several X extensions.
          • jude- 6y ago
            > you will actually find them to be smaller than the respective X11/XCB backends there, for various reasons. It doesn't seem surprising to me. As X.org has gained extensions over the last 30 years, toolkits that speak X11 find themselves having to decide which extensions they'd like to use. Adding flexibility on this naturally leads to a bigger feature matrix. Of course, the toolkits are also free to drop support for X servers that don't have those extensions, which in turn would shrink the X11 backend. I have no doubt that in 30 years, they'll have a similarly-sized feature matrix for all the Wayland extensions they'll want to support.
            • cycloptic 6y ago
              Or perhaps by then we will have moved onto another protocol that's even simpler.
              • jude- 6y ago
                Better idea: fix the bad life choices that got us to this point, so we don't have to keep re-living them. What a concept!
      • jude- 6y ago
        How much of that 1 million lines of code actually gets executed? Also, everyone runs the X server, so its code gets a lot of testing. This isn't true for window managers -- there's a long tail of them. This is just one data point, but in my experience I've had window managers crash far more often than X servers (since they get less love).
      • wander_homer 6y ago
        Actually most of the crashes I had with Sway were in fact related to compositing and window management. including stupid stuff like crashing because sway couldn't decide which window to focus after hiding another.