X11 and Wayland: A tale of two implementations

FOSDEM 2020

In this talk I will outline my journey implementing my X11 window manager hikari and the corresponding Wayland compositor shortly after. hikari is a stacking window manager/compositor with some tiling capabilities. It is still more or less work in progress and currently targets FreeBSD only but will be ported to Linux and other operating systems supporting Wayland once it has reached some degree of stability and feature completeness.

This talk covers:

a brief explanation regarding differences between X and Wayland
some of hikari's design goals and motivation
choice of programming language
an overview of libraries that were used
tools for ensuring code quality and robustness
obstacles
resources that helped me to implement the whole thing

Speakers: raichoo