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Comment by guappa | Hacker News Reader

wayland's main purpose is to isolate ~~malware~~ proprietary software running in a container, which Xorg doesn't allow (unless of course you run nested servers).

It wouldn't be too bad of a goal if it had feature parity, which it still doesn't have.

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Wayland was started in 2008; the same year that Sun was already shipping Trusted Extensions for X11 that allowed per-window security controls.

Trusted Solaris 7 had shipped in 1999; 9 years BEFORE Wayland ever existed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Trusted_Extensions

X11 does have various ways to restrict access (one of which ssh does use for instance) and some more advanced security extensions. But as far as I can tell there has never been that much motivation to widely deploy any of it.

Eh even if you secure the X11 API itself, the Xorg server still is a 33 year old (!) c codebase.

Linux is 33 years old as well. Let's stop using it to be secure?

Linux is not as secure as most tech people would assume at first glance. The monolithic kernel with all device drivers in ring0 is, let's just say, not the best approach if one were writing a new OS from scratch.

It is mostly "secure" due to it being used in practically every server and billions of devices, so there is an active maintainer community around it. Xorg has none of that.

It is only one old C codebase however (or a couple if one counts the *BSD semi-forks separately) instead of many different fresh c codebases (one per compositor with some shared code between some of them to be fair). I don't buy that this is actually better for security. It is a lot of more fun/less painful than cleaning up and improving some legacy codebase however.

There's nothing that forces a Wayland compositor to be written in C. I've seen ones written in C++, Zig, and Rust, but you could really use any language as long as you can still call the appropriate system/kernel APIs

Nothing preventing you from writing a X11 server in something else either (and people have done so!). But fact is, most wayland compositors right now are either pure C or C++ (and I think the rest uses at least wlroots?). Many X11 window managers are written in non-c languages too and I don't think I am too far off the mark when I say that a decent fraction of wayland compositors would just be external window managers if there existed a standardized interface for window managers when they were written (I think some compositors have an interface for external window managers now, but is there a standard interface by now?).

I far prefer one 33-year-old to four (and counting!) newer codebases that all try to do the same things slightly differently.

Eh, wlroots is in C. Tons of the Wayland stuff is in C. There's a bunch of good reasons to prefer Wayland, but this is probably the worst reason I've seen yet.

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