The Arcan Display Server's Progress With VR, Wayland Support & Security Experiments

[crazyloglad]

it has lua (luajit if i recall correctly) bindings which the developer use it self to develop the desktop and VR stuff

Correct, the WM itself is written in Lua5.1/LuaJit (if enabled). The special thing is that due to the way you bind C to Lua manually, the functions are extremely similar to how one might write protocol parsers, to the point that these functions can be exposed over a socket instead. This means that the ~250 drawing functions that are defined in the Lua API will also "real-soon-now" be used as a 'drawing / network transparent API' when routed via the 'arcan-as-a-toolkit' version (arcan_lwa) OR as a privileged WM protocol for running 'arcan-as-a-display-server', retaining the Xorg separation between WM and server, but without the Xorg problems.

Furthermore, the API design is to be 'few calls/transitions' between VM and engine. To clarify: say an action like you want to animate moving an image across the screen. Instead of querying the scripts every frame for updates, you specify transformation chains, like "i want to move this image from here to here in this amount of time, tweened with this formula" and it is up to the engine to calculate the current position and update whenever it is reasonable. This means the engine can optimize for different scenarios, like emitting fewer frames when on low power or prioritize input latency and animations aren't fixed to some 60Hz nonsense, if the screen has a better refreshrate - so will the animations.

[crazyloglad]

There are more contributors (and commercial sponsorship for a year or two, I am gagged as to the details but suffice to say that the engine has pulled a few hundred thousand hours of computer vision for performance analysis by now), though the other ones that have contributed didn't want exposure and I respect that - it is a lot less stressful to "just code" and avoid the management part or the depression from reading things on places like the toilet of humanity that is reddit. Public communication alone stalls my productivity and that's a factor towards the overall silence - I code because I need it for .. things.

There are a lot of parts you can play around with that doesn't require C or where lack of C experience isn't particularly harmful. If you need better interfaces than that, those are just around the corner.

[TheOne]

...I wish I were better at coding C or I would try to help... I'd love to develop visualization tools on this.

it has lua (luajit if i recall correctly) bindings which the developer use it self to develop the desktop and VR stuff

[vegabook]

I would dare to say that at this point Arcan is a much better project than Wayland, and the guy developing it knows what he is doing.

What a pity that it only seems to have 3 contributors. I wish I were better at coding C or I would try to help. I hope it succeeds because the project looks amazing. I'd love to develop visualization tools on this.

[TheOne]

...
Even though Arcan is shaping up to be something amazing as well.

I would dare to say that at this point Arcan is a much better project than Wayland, and the guy developing it knows what he is doing.

[Vistaus]

I still don't understand why Arcan doesn't get more attention. I mean: I'm glad that you cover their progress for us every now and then, Michael, but in general, Wayland seems to get most of the attention by devs and most other media. Even though Arcan is shaping up to be something amazing as well.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Arcan Display Server's Progress With VR, Wayland Support & Security Experiments

One of the most fascinating hobbyist projects of interest on Phoronix in recent years has been Arcan, the display server built off a game engine and that has been amassing an interesting feature set, and with it the project's Durden desktop environment. The project is celebrating its two year milestone since going public so they have recapped some of their recent work...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arcan-Display-Server-2018