Writing a Wayland compositor is MUCH harder than it should be

Wayland is awesome and it has forced a much needed disaggregation of the Linux graphics stack. I’ve recently been playing with sway and wayvnc, and watching GPU accelerated web-GPU demo running on a headless machine over VNC. Yeah, Mac and Windows can both do that too, but it’s not nicely factored out like the Linux stack: KMS, DRM, libinput, etc. Wayland is also just a nicely designed core protocol. Surfaces and presentation and damages regions all make sense and it’s The Right Way (TM) to build a flicker free desktop on modern GPUs.

It’s not clear to me why people think writing a Wayland compositor should be easy. It’s not a window manager. It’s the equivalent of the X server and the WM put together. There should be maybe 3-4 Wayland compositors out there tops, and it seems like there are way more than that.