If you haven't heard of gastown it is my sincere pleasure to be the one to fix that. If you're like me and you have way more ideas than time or ability to type them, gastown is an absolute game changer. I haven't felt this jazzed about programming in decades, like, I'm using antiquated slang like "jazzed" without embarrassment. Well. Not embarrassment about that. I awoke to a polite note from a…
I've been working on kopper recently, which is a complementary project to zink . Just as zink implements OpenGL in terms of Vulkan, kopper seeks to implement the GL window system bindings - like EGL and GLX - in terms of the Vulkan WSI extensions. There are several benefits to doing this, which I'll get into in a future post, but today's story is really about libX11 and libxcb. Yes, again. One…
If you want to write an X application, you need to use some library that speaks the X11 protocol. For a long time this meant libX11, often called xlib, which - like most things about X - is a fantastic bit of engineering that is very much a product of its time with some confusing baroque bits. Overall it does a very nice job of hiding the icky details of the protocol from the application…
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feeding over the last 15 years or so, I feel like I have something to say about that. The thing about being the maintainer of a public-facing project for nearly the whole of your professional career is it's difficult to separate your own story from the project. So…
In an ideal world, every frame your application draws would appear on the screen exactly on time. Sadly, as anyone living in the year 2020 CE can attest, this is far from an ideal world. Sometimes the scene gets more complicated and takes longer to draw than you estimated, and sometimes the OS scheduler just decides it has more important things to do than pay attention to you. When this happens,…