As promised in the last entry, I'll write a bit about my first larger Rust project: A window manager using the XCB bindings to the X protocol. I chose this for a multitude of reasons:
In conclusion, such a task fills a gap. Why not fill it?
At this point you might ask yourself > Why the salty title?
The answer is pretty simple: XCB is very poorly documented, and it's extension libraries don't even announce their existence properly on the web. Yes, you've heard that one right - the extension libraries that provide functions to implement EWMH (more on that later) and other things lack everything but the source code.
When I finally found them, got the source and thought about providing Rust bindings, I was greeted by two levels of m4 and CPP macros. Very... inviting. This quickly rendered my idea pretty useless - even providing Haskell bindings for Capstone wasn't an entirely pleasant experience, a fair bit was boring, the rest is documented here - and this libraries would be much worse: Apparently, the code is preprocessed heavily, and for some reason constants whose origin I was unable to trace get replaced as well.
Long, boring story short: I was able to find the implementation of the functions commonly used by C window managers to emulate the same procedures in Rust.
However, writing code for a big, legacy-ridden protocol is a bit tedious and documentation is abysmal as I mentioned already.
To conclude these pointless ramblings - It's not at all as bad as it sounds: Basic structure is done already and progress is being made. When I have a solid technical overview of the window manager ready, I will write about it. So far, you can look at the code if you wish: gabelstaplerwm, which is badly documented and ugly so far - that seems to be good taste in the world of X programming.
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