Message-ID: <66453f9d@news.ausics.net>
From: not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev)
Subject: Re: why X
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
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Date: 16 May 2024 09:05:01 +1000
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On 15 May 2024 09:37:51 +1000, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> 
>> XFree86 and later X.org used to include the TinyX servers that stripped
>> out all but the bare essentials for a small, relatively self-contained,
>> executable which worked (and still works) with most X software.
> 
> So what's missing? Xrandr? XShm? XFixes? XComposite? XShape?
> XTest? Xv?

Nothing to stop most programs from working, as I said. The main
limitation preventing some software from working is that 3D
graphics using OpenGL aren't supported because it doesn't support
GLX etc.

>> The point is that efforts really haven't been directed at making X
>> smaller in the recent years up to when the paid developers switched to
>> Wayland, in fact the opposite has been happening.
> 
> What sort of things have they been adding that could be removed?

No idea, I was just saying (in the part that, as usual, you snipped)
that the size difference can be observed by building old vs current
X releases on the same platform with the same compiler settings.
Programs I tried that had been built against recent X.org libs
still worked with the smaller XFree86 libs, so the observed
improvement in former was about nill.

>> When an old program just uses Xlib directly ...
> 
> You still want to use Xlib rather than XCB?

For existing software Xlib works fine, and in old programs it's
more often seen than XCB, but the point (another over-snipping
victim) applies to either.

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