Re: Emacs as browser (was Re: Concurrency, again)

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/20/2016 11:04 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Is Wayland tied specifically to Linux?

No in theory, mostly yes in practice so far. Although Wayland is 
intended to be portable among Unix-like systems, it's currently mostly 
limited to the Linux kernel because its reference implementation is 
being developed on GNU/Linux.

Wayland itself is a protocol. Its reference implementation Weston relies 
on a compositor that in native mode currently requires Kernel Mode 
Setting (KMS) and the evdev input event interface, which were originally 
specific to Linux although there are efforts to port them to other 
kernels. Although it's not intended that Weston be specific to Linux in 
the long run (e.g., there is a DragonFlyBSD port) almost all Wayland and 
Weston users are running on GNU/Linux right now.

Also, Weston can run in backward compatibility mode attached to an X 
server, and in this mode it runs on kernels other than Linux (e.g., 
there is a unsupported port to FreeBSD). I don't think this approach is 
much used outside of GNU/Linux either, though.