The races I recall being described were substantially worse, but that’s largely beside my point.
My point is that, now that bare fillrate and framebuffer memory haven’t been a limiting factor for 15 to 20 years, it is a reasonable choice to build a desktop graphics system with the invariant of every frame being perfect—not even because of the user experience, but because that allows the developer to unequivocally classify every imperfect frame as a bug. Invariants are nice like that. And once that decision has been made, you cannot have asynchronous out-of-process window management. (I’m not convinced that out-of-process but synchronous is useful.) A reasonable choice is not necessarily the right choice, but neither is it moronic, and I’ve yet to see a discussion of that choice that doesn’t start with calling (formerly-X11) Wayland designers morons for not doing the thing that X11 did (if in not so many words).
To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.
> To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.
This is not a given, though. It's entirely feasible to have a stable "display manager/server" with an extension/plugin system where your WM of choice would sit. Crashing the latter should not bring down the former.
My point is that, now that bare fillrate and framebuffer memory haven’t been a limiting factor for 15 to 20 years, it is a reasonable choice to build a desktop graphics system with the invariant of every frame being perfect—not even because of the user experience, but because that allows the developer to unequivocally classify every imperfect frame as a bug. Invariants are nice like that. And once that decision has been made, you cannot have asynchronous out-of-process window management. (I’m not convinced that out-of-process but synchronous is useful.) A reasonable choice is not necessarily the right choice, but neither is it moronic, and I’ve yet to see a discussion of that choice that doesn’t start with calling (formerly-X11) Wayland designers morons for not doing the thing that X11 did (if in not so many words).
To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.