When first looking at the source code, I wondered why one would waste so much time to write 25k lines in raw assembly language, but then I saw that it was generated with Claude, for whom it does not matter much how expanded is the written text.
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".
Claude has surprisingly good knowledge of X11 protocol.
The other day, colleague showed me a (pretty basic) terminal emulator written in one-shot by Opus. Kicker is - that was a 30 KB static binary. That's right. No libX11, no libXfont, not even libc.
How many times have people posted here about how software is no longer optimized because CPUs keep evolving, making programmers lazy? It seems things have changed.
The question is: will LLMs manage to squeeze the most out of this hardware, better than compilers do?
In the few tests I’ve run, yes, a lot.
I am loving the shift from 'X11 is too big and messy to ever reimplement' to 'there are multiple wildly different X servers being built from scratch'.
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.
Yeah, I have a mostly-functioning X11 server in Ruby, myself (not anywhere public yet).
Isene and I have relatively similar philosophies on this, except I have Claude burning tokens on optimizing and fixing my Ruby compiler now because I still want things in a high-level language, and my entire stack is Ruby instead of asm. But I love what he's doing - I just don't love x86 asm...
Turns out a functioning X server is a relatively simple piece of software. It's mostly just tedious. And most of the bulk is protocol handling that Claude can handle really trivially.
Huh. So it's not the window manager. It's individual applications that are working or not.
Working: tile, dwm, pcmanfm-qt, feh, dmenu, glass
Not: alacritty, st
So... Thus far, anything but a terminal other than glass. I'd think the problem was alacritty doing fancy things with APIs that frame doesn't have, but st??
Was browsing some of the other rust projects(https://isene.org/fe2o3/#tools) and https://github.com/isene/torii says "Mozilla removed Firefox's "Open network login page" banner". I'm on windows and still see the banner so don't know if this is true. Is the really true on Linux?
I wonder if very cheap code generation will make software monocultures less relevant here. Because lots of incompatible devices is awful to work with, security stuff may also hurt
I would like to see a similar project that fixes Wayland. Like, can someone vibe-code window positioning, add SSD to GNOME (damage was already done, but still), and add the ability to send events so you can automate and drive the app offscreen for testing.
OMG, yes, please, get rid of all those composers, all that mess that people are doing. X11 is 40 years of battle testing. Wayland in 22 years (it already has 18) will be 100x worse than X11.
A Dockbar I am working on https://github.com/edumucelli/docking/ is a pain to build on Wayland. It already supports a lot of composers and even mutter/gnome with that Gnome shell extension, but at what cost ...
> The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand.
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.
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?
The really unfortunate thing about linux is the defaults tend to be not battery friendly.
For example, I recently got another 1 hour out of my old laptop's battery because I didn't realize for the intel video card driver I needed to add some modprobe flags to get it to load up a firmware binary blob. Doing that enabled hardware video decoding, faster performance, and lower power usage.
There's a bunch of setting like this that you need to make sure are turned on to get the best battery performance. Some OSes are better about toggling them than others and mine (gentoo) let's you discover later that you forgot to turn them on :).
This is where looking at the gaming centric distros and doing what they do makes sense. I haven't seen all kernel settings for all distros, but my understanding is many choose the defaults and most of the defaults are more optimized for server usage. Which makes sense. Debian's biggest deployment environment is a fleet of servers. For the standard Debian Install, of course. However, my laptop is not a server, so the defaults don't make sense. This is where we maybe need distros that their whole niche is to be laptop friendly. Or, get the bigger distros, to offer a flavor with a different set of defaults for laptop environments.
Yeah, I have this problem. IIRC the last time I looked into it, it requires a specific version of the nVidia driver which isn't the latest version (very unfortunately). I just bit the bullet and went with the 5W of constant consumption rather than figure out how to get that old driver working with my setup.
That's really sad to hear. I think it's just so much to configure for any human to take on. I'm going to run my system config through an LLM and have it optimize it for me see if that works.
You might want to take a look at TLP[0]. It, among other things, backs the power mode/profile panels in Gnome/KDE.
Many distros already try to push good defaults, but you can do a whole lot when optimizing for a mobile experience. You can also do some fun stuff with it, like running a script[1] when going from ac->bat power to, e.g., turn of a service, lower refresh rate or reduce brightness.
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.
The other day, colleague showed me a (pretty basic) terminal emulator written in one-shot by Opus. Kicker is - that was a 30 KB static binary. That's right. No libX11, no libXfont, not even libc.
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.
Isene and I have relatively similar philosophies on this, except I have Claude burning tokens on optimizing and fixing my Ruby compiler now because I still want things in a high-level language, and my entire stack is Ruby instead of asm. But I love what he's doing - I just don't love x86 asm...
Turns out a functioning X server is a relatively simple piece of software. It's mostly just tedious. And most of the bulk is protocol handling that Claude can handle really trivially.
by claude code. So this was only possible since no human had to bear looking at X original source code.
Working: tile, dwm, pcmanfm-qt, feh, dmenu, glass
Not: alacritty, st
So... Thus far, anything but a terminal other than glass. I'd think the problem was alacritty doing fancy things with APIs that frame doesn't have, but st??
COBOL and 4 GL dreams coming into reality.
A Dockbar I am working on https://github.com/edumucelli/docking/ is a pain to build on Wayland. It already supports a lot of composers and even mutter/gnome with that Gnome shell extension, but at what cost ...
No dependencies and better performance? Fantastic.
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.
I wish mine had no fan too except me.
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'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?
Also disable hardware SMT as a kernel option in grub config. Then the cores can clock down way more often and L1 data cache size doubles.
XFCE and X11 tripled my laptop battery life vs. whatever Wayland+GNOME Ubuntu (2024?) brought by itself.
Powertop and tlp also help.
Happy camping.
EDIT: the lower heat dissipation also halved boot time. That one surpised me the most.
EDIT2: Disable "atime" with ext4 option "noatime". Saves a lot of power, heat, trimming, and re-writes on your SSD/NVMe.
For "faster shutdowns" manually run systemctl start fstrim.service. Not exactly sure why fstrim.timer seems unreliable.
For example, I recently got another 1 hour out of my old laptop's battery because I didn't realize for the intel video card driver I needed to add some modprobe flags to get it to load up a firmware binary blob. Doing that enabled hardware video decoding, faster performance, and lower power usage.
There's a bunch of setting like this that you need to make sure are turned on to get the best battery performance. Some OSes are better about toggling them than others and mine (gentoo) let's you discover later that you forgot to turn them on :).
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel#GuC.2FHuC_firmware
Many distros already try to push good defaults, but you can do a whole lot when optimizing for a mobile experience. You can also do some fun stuff with it, like running a script[1] when going from ac->bat power to, e.g., turn of a service, lower refresh rate or reduce brightness.
[0]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html [1]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/usage/run-on.html#run-on-ac-run-on-...
https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11