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by charcircuit 164 days ago
>That's easy to say in hindsight

That's an easy way to excuse bad design. Look at the designs of other operating systems designed by professionals and you won't see windows managers having to handle raw inputs or being in the same process as the compositor.

1 comments

Examples of other operating systems allegedly not designed by professionals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

The Desktop Window Manager is a compositing window manager, meaning that each program has a buffer that it writes data to; DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925095929/http://developer....

The Quartz Compositor layer of Mac OS X comprises the window server and the (private) system programming interfaces (SPI) implemented by the window server. In this layer are the facilities responsible for rudimentary screen displays, window compositing and management, event routing, and cursor management.

The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in what appears on the screen. It is a lightweight server in that it does not do any rendering itself, but instead communicates with the client graphics libraries layered on top of it. It is “agnostic” in terms of a drawing model.

The window server has few dependencies on other system services and libraries. It relies on the kernel environment’s I/O Kit (specifically, device drivers built with the I/O Kit) in order to communicate with the frame buffer, the input infrastructure, and input and output devices.

Window management on Windows is done by Explore which talks to DWM where the underlying windows live.

Window management on MacOS is done by Dock which talks to Quartz Compositor where the underlying windows live.

You are conflating Window Manager with Task Switcher programs.
No, I'm not. Explore and Dock are responsible for more than just that.
Sorry but you’re just wrong. Explore.exe and Dock.app are nere user interfaces and are not involved in the render pipeline of other apps.
I am talking about window management. Window management is about controling windows, windows managers should not care about how windows are rendered.