April Fools' Or Should Wayland Switch Away From Using C?

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 2 April 2017 at 04:18 AM EDT. 51 Comments
WAYLAND
An independent developer wrote a message on the Wayland mailing list this weekend how Wayland should "move away from C." While Rust is all the fun these days to those looking towards a "safer" programming language, it was suggested Wayland be re-implemented in Haskell.

The message can be found on wayland-devel.

While it may be quickly written off as an April Fools' joke, that same developer has for months been working on a Haskell implementation of the Wayland protocol. The Haskell-ized Wayland is called "Sudbury" and has been for months been in the works by this lone developer. The developer, Auke Booij, wrote "Let's develop a more friendly and inviting library. Sudbury is an attempt to serve many usages of the wayland protocol: desktop applications, compositors, protocol dumpers, test utilities...In addition, we would like to support many different programming paradigms - especially since in Haskell there are many different approaches to streaming IO...While libwayland hides implementation details, sudbury exposes implementation details...We intend to place unsafe code in self-contained modules, separated from the Haskell code we intend users to use directly."

Those interested in the Haskell-based Wayland Sudbury project can find it hosted on GitHub. But beyond that, feel free to discuss "Wayland in [your favorite language]" in the forums for some interesting weekend fodder.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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