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A comment on Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf] by rackjack on Saturday November 27, 2021 @03:39PM (#29363159)
Don't feel too bad about X11... iirc it's extremely difficult to be compliant with the standard, since they apparently codified the quirks of the different existing implementations into the standard itself. Wayland is purportedly more sane.

Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418992

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Re:Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf] by woodruffw on Saturday November 27, 2021 @06:13PM (#29364550)
The X11 protocol itself[1] isn't actually that complicated: it's large and old, but the fundamentals are mostly consistent and the modern client bindings (libxcb) are even generated automatically from a machine-readable protocol spec[2]. Various extensions and standards composed on top of X11 further complicate things, but most of them are graceful client-side enhancements rather than required components of a functional X11 client and server setup.

[1]: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/x11proto/proto.pdf

[2]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xcb/proto/plain/src/xcb.xsd

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