This is the sort of thing I hope to see a lot more of from Rust. Things that would traditionally be done in C/C++ moving to a new language with modern features. I'm very hopeful this trend will continue.

The thing is, most languages can be used for writing a Window manager.

But since the alternatives to C and C++ kind of faded away from mainstream and they are anyway the UNIX system languages, most developers seldom look for alternatives.

With Rust, Go, D, Haskell, OCaml, .NET Native/Mono AOT, Java AOT compilers, hopefully developers will eventually realize that not everything needs to be coded in C or C++.

chriswarbo

Most languages can be used for writing most things; however, for X11 window managers in particular, all of the APIs are exposed as C libraries, so the C family has a natural advantage. Other languages need an interface to those C libraries, a more idiomatic wrapper on top, and then a window manager can be written.

I've played with the Xlib libraries in Haskell and it wasn't the prettiest code I've ever written ;)

burntsushi

Not in the Go ecosystem. :-) We have a real, pure (concurrent) X client protocol implementation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb (and of course, a WM: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo, which is hybrid tiling and stacking, kind of like Xmonad meets Openbox). /shameless plug

Of course, it's not all moonpies and pennywhistles. XGB only supports basic extensions like RandR, Xinerama, Render and Composite. But it's missing Xinput and XKB (which are monstrous).