The state of X

Today's ponderings and readings have, at a whim, been about the X Window System. No particular reason; there was just a Slashdot story about a mostly unimportant internal change in the XFree86 project, and then I started reading through the comments at a whim and started getting interested in the state of X development again.

I find X rather interesting, since it's an extremely old protocol with a fairly old and crufty implementation that has proven to be stable and sufficiently flexible that it's not at all obvious there's any reason to replace it (although rewriting some of the core libraries is looking like a good idea). In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Usenet and INN. I know little to nothing about graphics and don't have a lot of desire to learn more right now, but I like watching how software projects are organized and developed and I get a boost out of interesting people doing interesting things.

Anyway, I've been wandering through freedesktop.org, seeing what they've been up to, and have been quite impressed. (I also really am starting to love wiki technology.) A few other interesting things have turned up:

• An interview with various people involved in X development
• A Usenix 2003 paper on X performance
• The freedesktop.org X libraries project

Posted: 2003-12-31 22:57 — Why no comments?