There is really no excuse for a low-level API to be hard to use. It's just poor API design, plain and simple.

At the very least there should be a standardized (and centralized) client library on top of Wayland but below widget frameworks like GTK or Qt which implements the missing "desktop window system features": opening, moving, sizing windows (with decorations please), mouse and keyboard input events, clipboard, drag-and-drop. Non-GTK/Qt applications should never have to talk directly to the asynchronous Wayland APIs, only to this wrapper library.

Such a library should be designed to make programmers want to move on from X11 (because writing code against Xlib is horrible, but somehow Wayland managed to be even worse) - and tbh, this new window system client library (at first on top of X11) should have been the top priority of the Wayland project before starting to work on the actual X11 replacement, and it should have shipped on all desktop Linux distros at least a decade ago so that application programmers could have been won over (and for collecting feedback) even before Wayland shipped its first version.

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vimredo 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I might be mistaken, but isn't this what libraries like winit exist for? It might not be just for wayland, but it seems like it supports everything you mentioned other than drag and drop.

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flohofwoe 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Generally yes (or GLFW, or SDL), but the Wayland project shouldn't delegate the job to burned out hobbyists (who will think twice before wasting their time with bad APIs). This client library should really be a mandatory part of each Wayland install as a system library, not part of the application. And most importantly, the Wayland project needs to start eating their own dogfood, or things will never improve.

	▲	tuna74 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Generally yes (or GLFW, or SDL), but the Wayland project shouldn't delegate the job to burned out hobbyists (who will think twice before wasting their time with bad APIs)." Who do you think work on the various parts in Wayland if not "burned out hobbyists"?