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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I share the author's opinion that xlib is harder to grok than the X11 protocol, because it's the X11 protocol plus a queuing system where you will sometimes receive out-of-band messages, plus a large number of seldom-used utilities.

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Working with X11 client libraries written in other languages is a revelation in how much nicer an X11 client can be. CLX (Common Lisp) or xgb (Go) are some good examples.

(Talking about native implementations here not xlib bindings).

Same here. My window manager, terminal, (very basic) file manager all use pure Ruby X11 bindings, and the more I looked at where Xlib deviates (wraps, obscures) the protocol, the more places it felt easier to just use the X requests directly. I haven't looked at XCB much, but my understanding is that it's a much more direct binding to the X protocol, so if I were to write an X client in C using a client library, I'd almost certainly look at XCB rather than Xlib.

I’d love to check out your Ruby code. Link?

I'm not GP, but I'm pretty sure this is it: https://github.com/vidarh/rubywm

I remember seeing this on HN a few months ago and thought it was super cool.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39087609

I remember seeing this on HN a few months ago! Looks pretty badass. I plan to play around with it when I get some time. I love Ruby, and have long loved the idea of a WM/desktop in Ruby. A friend of mine is diehard Xmonad user and the power of being able to write code to extend the WM is fascinating.

Also just wanted to let you know that I sent you an email. Don't feel obligated to respond or anything, just wanted to let you know because I sometimes get emails from people on HN but they go to an inbox I don't often check so I often don't see them until long after unless they tell me in a comment that they emailed me.

Yeah, I've not been a fan of xlib. xcb is a much better library, IMHO, although it's not much more than talking X11 yourself. With Xlib, it seems like they tried to make things 'easier' by having high level concepts and a lot of synchronous apis, but they don't really fit on top of X, so you're fighting the library. Unfortunately, xcb came later and lots of things were already built on xlib, so lots of software has unnecessary synchronicity that makes things slow when you use the network stuff.

Using XCB is often a much better experience than xlib.

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