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Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there's Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.
If you're going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don't know much about it.
That right there. X11 was released in the mid-80s and has become an unmaintainable patchwork of additions. Nobody wants to develop or maintain the code because changing one thing breaks five others.
Wayland also takes advantage of 3D acceleration, since each window is a plane rendered in 3D space. There's no longer a choice between massive input lag with a compositor and massive screen tearing without.
I mean, the extension system means we could easily fix it, just deprecate the old paths, use the legacy xlib to set up extensions and write a lighter stack from there. A new input path too and you're on your way.
It makes things a bit more complicated, but it's also exactly how x86 managed to stay relevant all these decades, the old macro instructions are all slow microcode and you only use the safe stuff that's hyper-optimized.
Meanwhile you get the one thing X has: It works.
Wayland works.