KWinFT 5.21 Beta Pushes a "Monumental Rewrite" Of The Windowing Logic

KDE developer Roman Gilg continues pushing ahead with KWinFT as a fork of the KWin window manager / compositor and other select components. He spent a lot of time last year better optimizing the X11 and Wayland handling while he's been relentlessly working this year to push it even further.

Roman has released the KWinFT 5.21 Beta following what he describes as a "monumental rewrite" to the windowing logic as part of an overall "windowing revolution." For this windowing revolution Gilg has been working on flattening/simplifying the window/surface hierarchy, making the code cleaner and more comprehensible, and ultimately to improve the Wayland sub-surfaces support.

This major rewrite has come in at over 300 patches and changing over fifty thousand lines of code. Gilg further commented, "In the end this paves the road for all future improvements, enables us to build them on solid foundations, on a rebuilt core of what defines KWinFT, the most advanced, most modern windowing compositor in the world. That is why this revolution was necessary now, that is why I decided to push every other potential work item to afterwards. We first needed to reshape KWinFT's vibrating, pumping and now finally again blossoming heart, before work on anything else made sense again, be it features for our Wayland session or bug fixes on X11."

Moving forward, he is planning a major refactoring of the KWinFT render code.

More details on the current and future improvements for KWinFT can be found over on Roman's blog.