7 ms·

Most languages can be used for writing most things; however, for X11 window managers in particular, all of the APIs are exposed as C libraries, so the C family

Most languages can be used for writing most things; however, for X11 window managers in particular, all of the APIs are exposed as C libraries, so the C family has a natural advantage. Other languages need an interface to those C libraries, a more idiomatic wrapper on top, and then a window manager can be written. I've played with the Xlib libraries in Haskell and it wasn't the prettiest code I've ever written ;)

pjmlp 12y ago
This is what caused me eventually to move from Turbo Pascal to C++ during the Windows 3.1 time frame. I started to get fed up with writing bindings to libraries not directly supported by Turbo Pascal and pure C was a no go for me.
- fspeech 12y ago
  I am a recent convert to C++ for the same reason (though not from Pascal but other high level languages like Prolog). I wrote my own Prolog interpreter with minimal footprint so I can still get an interactive prompt with a high level interface if I want to, but it is designed to be easy to expose C++ instead of the other way around.
burntsushi 12y ago
Not in the Go ecosystem. :-) We have a real, pure (concurrent) X client protocol implementation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb (and of course, a WM: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo, which is hybrid tiling and stacking, kind of like Xmonad meets Openbox). /shameless plug Of course, it's not all moonpies and pennywhistles. XGB only supports basic extensions like RandR, Xinerama, Render and Composite. But it's missing Xinput and XKB (which are monstrous).
- bentrevor 12y ago
  When I saw this article, I thought "I bet burntsushi wrote it". I've been learning a lot from reading your Go code lately.
  - burntsushi 12y ago
    Heh, thanks. I spent years of my life with X getting my perfect WM. I'm happy to say I got there. But I can't stomach much more of X. :-)
- pjmlp 12y ago
  I was actually looking for your code when I posted, but somehow forgot to refer to it in the end. Good work!

pjmlp 12y ago

This is what caused me eventually to move from Turbo Pascal to C++ during the Windows 3.1 time frame. I started to get fed up with writing bindings to libraries not directly supported by Turbo Pascal and pure C was a no go for me.

fspeech 12y ago
I am a recent convert to C++ for the same reason (though not from Pascal but other high level languages like Prolog). I wrote my own Prolog interpreter with minimal footprint so I can still get an interactive prompt with a high level interface if I want to, but it is designed to be easy to expose C++ instead of the other way around.

burntsushi 12y ago

Not in the Go ecosystem. :-) We have a real, pure (concurrent) X client protocol implementation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb (and of course, a WM: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo, which is hybrid tiling and stacking, kind of like Xmonad meets Openbox). /shameless plug Of course, it's not all moonpies and pennywhistles. XGB only supports basic extensions like RandR, Xinerama, Render and Composite. But it's missing Xinput and XKB (which are monstrous).

bentrevor 12y ago
When I saw this article, I thought "I bet burntsushi wrote it". I've been learning a lot from reading your Go code lately.
- burntsushi 12y ago
  Heh, thanks. I spent years of my life with X getting my perfect WM. I'm happy to say I got there. But I can't stomach much more of X. :-)
pjmlp 12y ago
I was actually looking for your code when I posted, but somehow forgot to refer to it in the end. Good work!