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Comment by strange_aeons | Hacker News Reader

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strange_aeons

Sway is written in C, though.

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Huh. You’re right.

I wonder why I thought it was written in rust.

How terrible of me not to check before saying that.

Confusion with way-cooler? https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler

Not to come off like an ass, but honestly when I read 'rust' I laughed. If you knew how the founders of Sway feel about rust + the difficulties people have had with creating rust wayland compositors (particularly with wlroots), the idea of Sway being quoted as written in rust is almost satirical

I'm not sure what difficulty you mean aside from way cooler, please check out smithay/anvil if you want to see decent progress on a rust wayland implementation: https://github.com/Smithay/smithay

Wlroots is a bit of an extreme case as the API is mostly idiomatic to low-level C and not easy to wrap in safe rust, I believe the developers are also not keen on supporting C++ either. This is intentional design choice on their part, as "language-binding-friendly" C APIs usually tend to expose some kind of reference counting or smart pointers that make it easy to adapt to a higher level language.

I should have said just with wlroots. Though smithay isn't a full compositor. There's a BSPWM issue on github (I can't be assed finding it rn) about Wayland where the authors of waycooler explained their difficulties in creating a rust wayland window manager after someone suggested that the wayland version of BSPWM should be written in rust. The waycooler devs generalised their statement to the wayland protocol in general, but in hindsight what they were likely referring to was just their struggles in wlroots.

I can't edit my original reply to you because I'm not on desktop right now and the mobile app I use doesn't support edits, but here's the response from the waycooler dev. Note he actually was talking about wayland as a whole, not just wlroots. Obviously it's just one take on the matter, but it's a credible one based on their background: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/issues/199#issuecomment...

I would take that person's opinion on smithay/anvil with a grain of salt as they are not a dev there. They are making steady progress so you can just check the code there. Maybe ask one of those contributors for their opinion?

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