Linux display-protocol implementations involve tedious code
Developers building X11 servers, window managers, or Wayland support face repetitive protocol-handling work, even when specifications are available in machine-readable XML. Some use C libraries or implement bindings manually; others consider code generation but find maintaining a generator itself burdensome. The signals point to a specialized developer-tool opportunity, but do not establish how many developers would pay for it.
For linux graphics and window-system developers. Mentioned from Jan 2024 to Jul 2026 on Hacker News.
3 different people described this problem in 2 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 3.0/10
- Pain
- 4.0/10
- Frequency
- 5.0/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 4.1/10
- Who pays
- Professionals
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
Wasn't a lot of the protocol encoded in XML as part of libxcb? Could that be used to generate the tedious code for the X server?
I was tempted to write the code to generate it from the XML spec, but a lot of the scaffolding for the current X11 binding predated my own work and it seemed like it'd be more and more painful work to write the generator than bite the bullet and do it manually
vidarh on Hacker NewsJan 2024
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 2 product ideas with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 4 places to find your first customers
- 3 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks