Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

Re:Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig by bitwize on Thursday December 25, 2025 @12:39PM (#46385847)

Funny, the other day I started writing an X server of my own. While I appreciate and welcome this work, I still use and write software that makes use of old X draw calls, which I intended to incorporate into my server, unlike the author of this work. So I'm glad to see my efforts have not been made largely redundant!

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Re:Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig by vidarh on Friday December 26, 2025 @05:21AM (#46390847)

I'd at least consider moving older draw calls into an xlib replacement. Not all of them are suitable for that, but e.g. sufficient font handling to beat Xorgs server side handling requires the Render extension plus ca. 1500 lines of C for a basic TrueType renderer, or half that in a higher level language, or just use FreeType which is a dependency for most X clients anyway.

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Re:Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig by bitwize on Friday December 26, 2025 @02:23PM (#46395277)

It's just a hobby, won't be big and professional like Xorg. Aiming for as much protocol completeness as I can manage within those constraints.

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Re:Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig by smorrow on Saturday January 03, 2026 @07:22AM (#46475751)

Is it written in C? If it is and you open-sourced it, someone might port it to Plan 9.

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Re:Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig by smorrow on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @02:02PM (#46530911)

What I meant by this is, if we had a decent X on Plan 9, we would actually use it, because right now remoting into other systems is just VNC...

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