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Whenever people complain about Wayland being hard to program in, I think about how Xlib was largely replaced by XCB, and OpenGL is increasingly marginalized in comparison to Vulkan.

Not to draw any specific analogy, but sometimes a fussy low-level interface is just important to have.

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> and OpenGL is increasingly marginalized in comparison to Vulkan

Vulkan's "API design deficits" (to put it mildly) have been recognized by Khronos though, and turning that mess around and making the API a "joy to use" is one of Khronos' main priorities at the moment (kudos to them for doing that).

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Joy-To-Use-2025

That's good to hear!

XCB did not largely replace Xlib. In fact, some (all?) implementations of Xlib are built on top of XCB.

Maybe the technical politics have changed, but I feel like I remember there was some push in the late 2000s to rewrite libraries that were using Xlib to instead use XCB.

Regardless, that's sort of my point: having a lower level fiddly layer is a desirable quality, and Xlib being rebased on top of it isn't exactly a counterexample.

Turns out you want to build higher-level interfaces on top of lower-level interfaces, not the other way around.

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