Wayland Gets A Simple Drawing Library

[Maxjen]

Wow, xterm has 65k lines of code! :O

http://st.suckless.org/

That is about 4 times as much as wayland.

Somehow I always thought it was extremely lightweight.

[GreatEmerald]

Oh, the horror!

I don't know, I was always somehow partial to TWM. It's pretty original. It would even work well for tablets, since one of the easiest things to do there is drag, and much harder is to precisely click something. Added a bit of a flashier interface and a unified way of minimising things/displaying the tray, it would pass for a modern, original UI.

[Delgarde]

Wow, xterm has 65k lines of code! :O

http://st.suckless.org/

That is about 4 times as much as wayland.

Somehow I always thought it was extremely lightweight.

The only thing LoC measures is how many lines of code there are - no more, no less. It's worthless as any kind of measure of complexity, or of how 'heavy' the program is.

[curaga]

Indeed, startup speed is a much better measure.

xterm is really slow in that regard, which prompted me to find alternatives a few years back. Rxvt was fast, but didn't support truetype fonts, aterm had some issues I can't remember anymore, I ended up using mrxvt.

st seems otherwise good, but no scrollback and no utmp are pretty much dealbreakers. No I'm not going to use wrapper programs for each.

[plonoma]

Don't know if this is bloat and the beginning of the dark path X has taken or is something that should be worked out.

[uid313]

Cairo

Just use Cairo?

[Teho]

Don't know if this is bloat and the beginning of the dark path X has taken or is something that should be worked out.

Bloat? It's an external libary.

Just use Cairo?

A while back I was interested in porting dmenu[0] and st[1] to wayland.
However, the available rendering stack (cairo + pango + glib +
opengl/pixman) seemed a bit overkill to me when all I needed was two
simple operations, "fill rectangle with color" and "draw monochrome text
with color".

[Nobu]

Bloat? It's an external libary.

However, the available rendering stack (cairo + pango + glib +
opengl/pixman) seemed a bit overkill to me when all I needed was two
simple operations

Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about this(^^), not the library he decided to write because of this.

Just use Cairo?

Cairo depends on glib and pixman...not sure what he has against these libraries, but...yeah.

[FLHerne]

Seeing as I used DMenu to open this very browser window, I'm quite happy with this news.

[mrugiero]

Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about this(^^), not the library he decided to write because of this.

Wayland doesn't mandate any of them. They make your life simple, since you are required to tell how to paint the buffer. If they get obsolete, you can just ditch them.

Cairo depends on glib and pixman...not sure what he has against these libraries, but...yeah.

Considering what he's porting is pretty much minimalistic software, Cairo is indeed overkill.