Vibe Coded X11 Server Written in Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support(www.phoronix.com)
15 pointsby hochmartinez2 hours ago3 comments
  • rayiner2 hours ago
    Writing a new X server from scratch would have been an enormous undertaking two decades ago. (Keith Packard did Kdrive but he’s literally the foremost expert on X11.) Part of what motivated Wayland was the difficulty of maintaining the X server.

    How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?

    • ninkendoan hour ago
      > How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?

      The dot com boom in 1999 was a bubble, but the internet was still useful and important and obviously survived.

      The bubble is due to the skyrocketing valuations and questionable financial future of the companies involved, not because AI isn’t useful.

    • vidarh41 minutes ago
      It's an undertaking, but there were multiple X servers for small platforms back in the day - the difficulty is overstated. It takes a few thousand lines of code to get a basic one together.

      Maintaining Xorg might be unreasonably hard.

      But I agree with you LLMs are amazing at this - I had Claude throw a half baked one together in less than 24h.

    • zajio1am37 minutes ago
      It is an much simpler task now since you can depend on kernel / mesa drivers for all hardware.
    • anonzzzies2 hours ago
      We are in a bubble and it's not overrated. Many people just have issues using it correctly it seems. Weird as after 30 years managing 1000s of programmers over that time, this feels the same, yet with many times more and often better output.
    • abc422 hours ago
      >How can we reconcile AI coding a functional X server with the assertions that AI is overrated and we’re in a bubble?

      Simple: AI is not overrated at all. Might still be a bubble though, that's an entirely different consideration.

      Something is still holding us back though. One would think that we'd have a dozen total rewrites of Linux at this point.

      • vidarh38 minutes ago
        Hobby OSs are dime a dozen but rarely go further for the simple reason that there is little motivation - you need programs to run, which typically means ABI compatibility, and you end up in a quagmire of writing drivers, with few benefits to show for it that you can't get by building something on top of an existing kernel instead.
    • guilhas26 minutes ago
      Waylanders propaganda to scare people of using x11

      And rewriting POCs of existing projects will not necessarily increase productivity

      Maybe development generally was getting unnecessarily complex, and people were cutting corners. And now with AI they will be able to do it better. Which possibly wouldn't directly be justified by the amount invested AI

  • mghackerladyan hour ago
    I don't understand the desire for an X11 rewrite. X.org is absolutely terrible, I understand starting from scratch, but wouldn't it make far more sense to make a backwards compatible X12?
    • vidarh43 minutes ago
      I actually started an "x12" in Ruby (yes...)

      It took Claude less than a day to get it to the point where Firefox runs and plays YouTube videos at decent speed - modern x apps does mostly client side rendering so the X11 server is rarely on the hot path.

      And then I started backfilling a lot of things I initially didn't want, because it turns out it takes very little code and it's fun to get xterm, twm, xeyes working and not just modern clients.

      There are bits I'll never add, or will do differently (e.g. TrueType server- side fonts instead of bitmaps because it's near trivial)

      But done right the complexity even of the legacy drawing modes is pretty limited.

      I've been a proponent of an 'x12' approach, but I'm less sure it makes sense now beyond very targeted deprecation, because I no longer believe it needs to add much complexity.

      I'm not sure how far I'll take my x11 server - it was pretty much done on a whim -, but at the moment it's rendering to an x11 window and I want to at least make it render to a gbm/dri backend for the sake of it - it won't be all that hard.

      What I've learnt is that the difficulty of writing an x11 server is vastly overstated - you can do a basic one in a few thousand lines of code in any high level language.

      • mghackerlady7 minutes ago
        Can I ask why you did it in ruby? I like ruby, don't get me wrong, but that seems pretty low on the list of languages an X12 would be written in.

        I think an X12 would be X11 with a cleaned up codebase, removed features, and additions of modern features that Wayland or Quartz have without compromising compatibility more than necessary

  • socratic_weeban hour ago
    eww