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Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by chriswarbo on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @05:19PM (#8764709)
Most languages can be used for writing most things; however, for X11 window managers in particular, all of the APIs are exposed as C libraries, so the C family has a natural advantage. Other languages need an interface to those C libraries, a more idiomatic wrapper on top, and then a window manager can be written.

I've played with the Xlib libraries in Haskell and it wasn't the prettiest code I've ever written ;)

Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by burntsushi on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @08:13PM (#8765508)
Not in the Go ecosystem. :-) We have a real, pure (concurrent) X client protocol implementation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb (and of course, a WM: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo, which is hybrid tiling and stacking, kind of like Xmonad meets Openbox). /shameless plug

Of course, it's not all moonpies and pennywhistles. XGB only supports basic extensions like RandR, Xinerama, Render and Composite. But it's missing Xinput and XKB (which are monstrous).

Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by bentrevor on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @09:31PM (#8765712)
When I saw this article, I thought "I bet burntsushi wrote it". I've been learning a lot from reading your Go code lately.
Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by burntsushi on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @10:06PM (#8765800)
Heh, thanks. I spent years of my life with X getting my perfect WM. I'm happy to say I got there. But I can't stomach much more of X. :-)
Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by pjmlp on Thursday December 18, 2014 @03:36AM (#8766484)
I was actually looking for your code when I posted, but somehow forgot to refer to it in the end.

Good work!

Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by pjmlp on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @05:43PM (#8764834)
This is what caused me eventually to move from Turbo Pascal to C++ during the Windows 3.1 time frame.

I started to get fed up with writing bindings to libraries not directly supported by Turbo Pascal and pure C was a no go for me.

Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust by fspeech on Thursday December 18, 2014 @12:16AM (#8766074)
I am a recent convert to C++ for the same reason (though not from Pascal but other high level languages like Prolog). I wrote my own Prolog interpreter with minimal footprint so I can still get an interactive prompt with a high level interface if I want to, but it is designed to be easy to expose C++ instead of the other way around.