Re: Window managers ( was Re: newbie question )

[David Chisnall]

On 23 Apr 2009, at 12:52, Yen-Ju Chen wrote:

> > XCB is now very stable and feature-complete.  The documentation is  
> > somewhat
> > lacking, but because XCB calls corresponds directly to protocol  
> > requests and
> > the protocol is very well-documented, this is not a big issue.  New  
> > versions
> > of XLib use XCB internally.
>
>  Sorry for my English.
>  I meant i3 is at very early stage, not XCB.
>  Maybe GNUstep should have a XCB backend.

I hope to have a chance to talk to Fred about this at some point  
during the hackathon next month.  There are two things that xlib is  
used for in the Arts and Cairo back ends:

1) Creating windows and binding arts / cairo surfaces to them.
2) Delivering events to the windows.

I'd like to eventually move to XCB for this, initially as an option  
and then as the default.  XCB is a small fraction of the code size of  
xlib (around 10%, less if you don't use many extensions, since they  
are all in separate libraries) and so it is a much better choice for  
small systems.

David