Frame β Linux X server in Assembly
96 points - today at 3:31 PM
SourceComments
If someone had written this program manually, the strategy would have been very different. With a good macro-assembler (and nasm is good enough) one should define a great number of macros, to encapsulate all the tedious boilerplate, especially for things like function prologues, epilogues and invocations.
With a well written macro library, an assembly program can be almost as compact as a C program, instead of containing many text lines for each equivalent high-level language statement.
Such an assembly source with good macros can be read and understood much more easily than raw assembly language, like in this "frame.asm".
Otherwise, this is interesting work.
I see the growing trend of words losing all meaning is still going strong in 2026. I wonder what human communication will look like in the near future?
Also, has anyone run it successfully? I got as far as building and running with --display and then running `DISPLAY=:7 dwm` and `DISPLAY=:7 alacritty`, but I can't seem to focus the window to actually type. Given that the author posted a picture of the thing actually running a live environment and claims to actually be using it, I'm pretty sure this is a me problem but I haven't been able to figure out where it is. Mouse works, too.
No dependencies and better performance? Fantastic.
AI wrote*
COBOL and 4 GL dreams coming into reality.
Working on it:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
And they also deleted old code too. A lot of the old code could probably be removed, but is it really that relevant whether you have 4 millions line of code or 2 million lines of code? C is in my opinion too overbose. Rust is even worse. Which language would yield fewer lines of code without speed penalty? C is king largely because of the speed gains. We don't see people use python for an xserver.
recently i also rewrite most of the app's underlying core function to rust, just like the guy do for the phone
perhaps i should also do more stuffs given codex reset too quickly
I wish mine had no fan too except me.
I've never quite found that Linux is more optimized on battery-powered machines for energy savings, even though supposedly there is a lot of room to tweak and optimize settings -- from selecting a low resource window manager/DE to turning off various services to switching up power management utilities. But this does seem like an approach that might produce that kind of fruit?