Wlroots-Based Xfce Xwfm4 Wayland Code Taking Shape

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wlroots-Based Xfce Xwfm4 Wayland Code Taking Shape

With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Xfwm4-Wayland-Wlroots-Parity

[Vistaus]

Interesting. I thought multiple people here had said that they were going to base it on Mir? Or was it MATE that was going to use Mir?

[DanL]

Or was it MATE that was going to use Mir?

MATE was looking at Mir at one point. I think xfce devs were going to keep an eye on their efforts to see how it worked and whether they could reuse any code.

[dragon321]

Good work. The more compositors built on wlroots, the better Wayland ecosystem will be. Wlroots compositors already can provide something comparable to small X11 WM - ability to customize things to get lightweight desktop. Like ability to choose between different panels, launchers etc.

[Steffo]

Good work. The more compositors built on wlroots, the better Wayland ecosystem will be. Wlroots compositors already can provide something comparable to small X11 WM - ability to customize things to get lightweight desktop. Like ability to choose between different panels, launchers etc.

While I think it's a good idea to have a shared code base, I don't like the fact, that wlroots is written in plain old C. I mean, we have 2022 and we should learn from the past. Using C is a high security risk and we have nowadays the option to use more secure programming languages with comparable performance like modern C++ or Rust. I mean, even Linux is open to Rust!
Having many wlroots users means, that one security hole will affect many users and using C as language means, that this will very likely happen.

[Quackdoc]

Love to see it, xfce4 might be the first good wayland environment for me

While I think it's a good idea to have a shared code base, I don't like the fact, that wlroots is written in plain old C. I mean, we have 2022 and we should learn from the past. Using C is a high security risk and we have nowadays the option to use more secure programming languages with comparable performance like modern C++ or Rust. I mean, even Linux is open to Rust!
Having many wlroots users means, that one security hole will affect many users and using C as language means, that this will very likely happen.

cosmic and a few other compositors are being written in rust, the projects to look at are smithay, which is the wlroots equivilent in rust. and cosmic-epoch is the "unified hub" for the rust cosmic stuff from pop-os

[kpedersen]

I don't like the fact, that wlroots is written in plain old C. I mean, we have 2022 and we should learn from the past.

It will be the spaceyear 3033 and we will still be writing fundamental libraries in C. The reason being that other higher level languages can bind against C much easier than other high level languages.

I.e getting Java to talk to Python is very difficult. Whereas they both talk to C fine via JNI, FFI.

C is not a programming language anymore. It is basically the entire computing platform (for better or worse).

[Steffo]

It will be the spaceyear 3033 and we will still be writing fundamental libraries in C. The reason being that other higher level languages can bind against C much easier than other high level languages.

I.e getting Java to talk to Python is very difficult. Whereas they both talk to C fine via JNI, FFI.

C is not a programming language anymore. It is basically the entire computing platform (for better or worse).

This is not really true, because C++ and Rust can also offer C ABI interfaces.

[poncho524]

This is not really true, because C++ and Rust can also offer C ABI interfaces.

So can Ada. We should push for more Ada use. Its been doing forever what rust claims to do.

[c117152]

It will be the spaceyear 3033 and we will still be writing fundamental libraries in C. The reason being that other higher level languages can bind against C much easier than other high level languages.

I.e getting Java to talk to Python is very difficult. Whereas they both talk to C fine via JNI, FFI.

C is not a programming language anymore. It is basically the entire computing platform (for better or worse).

You can inline c/c++ in rust: https://docs.rs/inline-c/latest/inline_c/