alt Hacker NewsI hate: Programming Wayland applications
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I agree that the lack of standardization around the "insecure" things is a bad idea. Insecure operations don't have to be available by default, or even universally supported, but a central registry of interfaces for e.g. retrieving all windows on a desktop would certainly help preventing fragmentation.
At the same time, most of this post really is just a rant essentially saying that a low-level library is so flexible that using it directly results in code so verbose it can hardly be read. Yes, that's how good low-level designs always are.
You can turn a generic portable asynchronous ANSI C interface into a simple, blocking and platform-specific one with an abstraction layer. You can integrate it with all sorts of existing event loops and programming frameworks. You can customize it all you like but using it directly in an application will cost you a lot of patience. At the same time, you can't go in the opposite direction; from a "simple" blocking black-box interface to something that can reasonably host a complex GUI toolkit. If you're after simplicity, go higher-level.
Seems like complaining about how difficult to use Win32 and COM are. And they are if you use them directly! You don't do that - you use libraries that others have sweated over, as you did with raylib.
The separate process for clipboard: yep... I'm having to do this to be able to get the cursor position myself in Wayland... (This is for a screen recorder app)
As a user, I like wayland. X11 was a security disaster. Wayland is much better about tearing.
What scares me though are all the responsibilities passed to compositors, because what ends up happening is that each compositor may reimplement what should be common functionality in annoying ways. This is especially true for input things, like key remapping. This ultimately fragments linux desktop experiences even harder than it was before.
I have no love lost for Wayland, but this:
> Make easy things easy. Make hard things doable.
is generally unachievable. Instead, pick one:
- easy things easy, hard things impossible
- easy things tedious, hard things possible
(Unless you want to maintain two sets of interfaces in parallel.)
I have used quite a bit of Gtk and QT, and have had to touch X11 or Wayland very little directly, EXCEPT for one case where I wanted to provide a global hotkey...
Writing 1300 lines of non-cross-platform windowing code sounds like masochism. GLFW is right there.
I sidestep by using neovim as my environment for pretty much everything and you can bridge the SPICE virtio clipboard channel to Wayland. You can get clipboard sharing to work natively on wlroots compositors.
The constant loud bile spewing over Wayland and systemd just won't stop here, will it?
It's getting a bit boring, especially since none really does more than complain.
Probably best off using a UI library like Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/
It satisfies the requirement to "make easy things easy, make hard things doable" and it also gets you cross platform support.
Sure puts the Wayland in Weyland-Yutani
The Decompositing Compositors, there's nothing much anyone can do.
Reminds me somewhat of Vulkan. I think the trend of making the actual specification of something lower level and less convenient is rather logical. Why burden implements with a load of convenience functions when that could be left up to libraries?
I can say I hate all GUI programming! Luckily, all my professional programming deals with back-end processing, so I was able to avoid GUIs :)
So I feel your pain. I did hear programming for Wayland is harder than X11, but I never did either so I have no idea if that is true.
Poor soul — they missed `wlroots` in their googling! You’re not supposed to be solving these issues yourself.
Wayland was designed from the point of view of theoretical purists. It's basically "how would a display server work in an ideal world", unfortunately, that design turns out to also be impractical and straight up developer/user hostile.