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0 pointsubercow135y ago0 comments

On the other hand on X11, Xorg cannot crash without the X11 client instances being affected - a much larger chunk of code. It's only because Xorg is older that that doesn't happen much.

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5 comments · 1 top-level

sprash5y ago· 4 in thread

A chunk of code that is running in production for more than 30 years and should be considered battle tested. In my experience Wayland compositors crash much more often than X11 despite the supposed reduced complexity. The last time X11 server crashed on me was in 2004 if I remember correctly.

ubercow13OP5y ago

Exactly, that reliability of Xorg is a function of its age and doesn't imply anything about the correct design of a Wayland compositor. What's the chance those Wayland crashes were in the window management code rather than the rendering, protocol, clipboard, and drag/drop handling code? dwm is 2000 SLOC to Xorg's 1 million or so. I don't think splitting out the WM code would have gained much.

sprash5y ago

You underestimate the inherent complexity of Wayland. As exercise I recommend to implement a "Hello World" native Wayland client. Watch and see the complexity explode when you simply want to add the functionality to take screenshots to that client.

jude-5y ago

How much of that 1 million lines of code actually gets executed? Also, everyone runs the X server, so its code gets a lot of testing. This isn't true for window managers -- there's a long tail of them. This is just one data point, but in my experience I've had window managers crash far more often than X servers (since they get less love).

wander_homer5y ago

Actually most of the crashes I had with Sway were in fact related to compositing and window management. including stupid stuff like crashing because sway couldn't decide which window to focus after hiding another.

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