Xenia - Xorg/Xlibre X server porting project

[Roman Vlasov]

On Sunday, 27 September 2026 at 14:46:37 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2026 at 10:42:45AM +0000, Roman Vlasov via 
> Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> Hello everyone!
>> I want to present you my small pet project.
>> 
>> In few word, its trying to port Xorg/XLibre X server from C to 
>> Dlang.
>> 
>> For more info see main GitHub page: 
>> https://github.com/vlasovroman96/xenia
> [...]
>
> "Small"? "Pet project"??  Porting the entire Xorg X server does 
> not sound like a "small pet project" in any sense of the word. 
> :-D
>
> Nevertheless, I applaud your effort.  In the long term, one 
> would expect the code to have less vulnerabilities caused by 
> C's deficiencies, such arrays decaying to pointers, etc..  But 
> from the sounds of it, it's currently just a straight 
> transliteration of C into D, so pretty much all of the problems 
> with a C codebase would still be present.  It will likely take 
> significant effort to replace the C idioms with D idioms. I'd 
> be very interested in the result, though, if you get there!
>
>
> --T

Thank you for your response!

Indeed, it is much more D-like-C than idiomatic D at the moment ;D

I originally chose the approach of “make it run first, refactor 
later”.
I needed a working, runnable codebase so I could be sure that 
further changes would not completely break the whole system.

 From there, I plan to gradually move the codebase towards a more 
idiomatic D style.
Even now, you can already see on small parts of the 
protocol-related modules how much simpler the code becomes, 
without losing anything in the process.

As an example of the absolute chaos in the structure of the 
original X server, I can mention something that happened just 
today: an incorrect monitor refresh rate setting caused crashes 
in a GTK context menu (!!!). It simply refused to appear in the 
XFCE4 window manager.

Or another example: in the Xdefs module, there were declarations 
related to fonts, with a note suggesting that they should be 
moved to Xos.
After moving them, the import paths for `DGAEvent`(!!!) broke .

*Yes, these are very closely related things.*
*Sarcasm.*

Things like this could easily sit in the C source code for years 
(and they did), but moving to D has already started exposing the 
*beauty* of the XOrg codebase from the very beginning.

And of course, this is also a great opportunity to show that D is 
perfectly capable of handling serious systems programming.

I hope this helps explain some of the reasoning behind the 
approach.