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Comment by bronson | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked at how fast Wayland is coming together. It's inspiring to watch.

Could it be that competition is the mother of productivity?

Competition with what? Windows, OS X? Xorg?

Edit: Can't seem to reply to child, but Mir isn't really a credible competitor (See: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/03/more-on-why-display-serve... . Unfortunately Mir seems to be mostly NIH; everyone else is cooperating on Wayland.)

Canonicals Mir

It's more that we have people working on it at several companies full-time now, including me.

I guess this is sarcasm. Wayland started in 2008.,yup, its like 6 years old and we still don't have it adopted enough for general use.

So, how many man hours should it take to design and implement a new display server architecture? I've been watching it's development without a clue how it's going because it's a big undertaking in a field I hardly understand, I don't know how many people are on the project or how much time they're putting in. If you could clear those up for me, that'd be cool.

Really, from 2008-2012, it's mostly been a one-man toy project. It's only since mid-2012 or so that we've had many different people working on it.

Until early 2014, I along with my team at Red Hat were busy building RHEL7. RHEL7 development has slowed down now, and full-time Wayland development has started.

The thing is, Wayland is a simplified display server that basically pushes all the hard problems onto others. So for instance there's no rendering code (that's handled via existing projects like Mesa and Cairo), no graphics driver abstraction layer (new graphics drivers are expected to fork Wayland), no seperation between window manager and display server (fork Wayland to change anything!), the input implementation is largely copied from X, network transparency and remoting are Some Else's Problem and require co-operation from app developers...

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