Xlibe: an Xlib/X11 compatibility layer for Haiku

[waddlesplash]

What about that GTK port that I saw screenshots of a while ago?

That was the work of @3dEyes (screenshots in this old thread) and it was an experiment that did not go as far as you might think. He commented about it on a ticket in HaikuPorts a few months ago:

@3dEyes

It’s hard to call it a port - just a little experiment. I just insert native window creation and surface rendering calls right into the Broadway backend code. The mouse works, but the keyboard doesn’t.

I wanted to write a GDK backend from scratch, but that’s a lot of code and so hard. The smallest available GDK bakend has about 1 megabyte of source code. The depricated bakend for MIR is only about 500 kilobytes, but it’s still a lot.

For me, writing code in pure C is a mockery. Especially the GTK itself is horrible on the inside, which makes the task even more difficult and brings no fun to coding.

In that same thread (where we were discussing XSDL, or the possibility even of writing an SDL backend for GTK, so that other obscure OSes could benefit too), I commented at the time that

@waddlesplash

A native backend is preferred but it will be a ridiculous amount of work to write, and will not be fun to maintain in the slightest. GTK applications always, perpetually, feel like second or third class citizens on every platform except for GNOME itself. I don’t think we can avoid that; so how much worse will an SDL2 port make things instead of a “native” port? Probably not very much, and they may make the workload sustainable.

I actually talked with one of the SDL developers about potentially trying to start some kind of campaign to collect funds for them to do such a port after these discussions, but that never materialized.

So, that is how we got where we are now: porting GTK directly is just not feasible or worth the time, the SDL backend idea was interesting but nothing much came of it, which leads us to: the only reasonable way to port GTK is to get X11 or Wayland. Seeing Tk have Xlib implementations outside of Linux, as well as seeing some other experiments about Xlib on top of SDL2, as well as the older “BeXlib” project from 2003 which I started this work off it, was enough for me to guess that a full enough version of Xlib-on-Haiku to run GTK on was at least theoretically possible, and so here we are.