[spicybright]

I'm not the most knowledgeable, but a protocol talks to another process through a specific format.

I personally think its more powerful than writing a new process to replace and existing.

My favorite example is an X11 windows manager implementing in about 18 lines of python.

Obviously there's dependencies to talk to the X server, but the power of a protocol comes from any program written in any la gage communicate with existing code.

[xorbax]

> My favorite example is an X11 windows manager implementing in about 18 lines of python.

Uh, do you happen to know where to find that project? Sounds pretty comprehensible for most people as an example.

[alpaca128]

Not sure about that Python project, but years ago I found this very minimal WM in a few hundred lines of C helpful: https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm

Was a lot easier to understand for me than, say, dwm.

[ChanderG]

I created my own X11 window manager [1] at the start of this year in around 800 lines of C.

I had been using dwm (4000 lines of C) for many years and wished to write my own for a long time, but what made me take the leap was really steveWM [2] and TinyWM [3] which are both super small.

[1] - https://github.com/ChanderG/cellwm [2] - https://github.com/stodd1031/steveWM [3] - https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm

[vidarh]

TinyWM was the starting-point for my wm in Ruby as well. It really drives home just how little you need to get started.

[spicybright]

Sure!

https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm

I've run it once a long time ago and worked perfectly fine for me.