alt Hacker NewsExactly my impression. And honestly, X11 isn't exactly beautiful like the author is implying. A lot of the same wayland complaints they are putting here apply to X11. The main difference is that wayland is apparently handling the event loop for you while X11 expects you to set that up yourself.
Win32 has exactly the same setup of problems here as wayland does. Moreso because Win32 just gives you back opaque handles which you are expected to keep track of and use the Win32 API to do any meaningful interactions.
The only understandable complaint is that wayland makes it hard for different windows to interact with one another for security. IMO, that's a silly goal to chase after, but that's just me.
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Having done some mobile development where app sandboxes have been prevalent for years, it's annoying to deal with but necessary. Given the bad behavior some devs attempt, often ad SDKs trying to perma-cookie users, stealing clipboards, etc, having a platform that can support app isolation seems necessary for normal desktop usage.
I used to program pure Xlib when I was 13 or so. I don't think the then-13-year-old me would manage pure Wayland.
A big complaint in TFA is that Win32 is much much easier to use than Wayland is:
>Getting any example application to work is so incredibly ridiculous, that every second I program on Wayland, I yarn for the times I did Win32 programming.
And that comes from the core of how Wayland is designed.
In Win32, the stable interface / ABI is the set of C functions provided by the operating system through DLLs. These are always dynamically loaded, so Microsoft is free to change the internal interface used for controlling windows at any time. Because of this, decades-old .exes still run fine on Windows 11.
In Wayland, the stable interface is the binary protocol to the compositor, in addition to the libwayland-client library plus extensions. Instead of that socket being an "implementation detail", it's now something that all programs that just want to make a window have to deal with. You also can't just use the socket and ignore the libwayland libraries, because mesa uses libwayland-client and you probably want hardware acceleration.
The other big issue is the core Wayland protocol is useless; you have to use a bunch of protocol extensions to do anything, and different compositors may implement different versions of them. On Win32, Microsoft can just add another C function to user32.dll and you don't have to think about protocol how that gets transformed into messages on the socket layer, or compatibility issues with different sets of extensions being supported by different compositors.