What’s happening

Way Cooler is going to be entering an official hibernation period for the next three months (as opposed to the unofficial hibernation period that it’s currently in).

I will not be pushing any code for three months due to contractual obligations I have with Google. This limitation will be lifted on November 2nd, 2018.

Patches will still be accepted during that time, there just won’t be any from me.

Wait is this still being worked on??

I still fully intend to see Way Cooler through to completion, however it’s been very difficult to work on it recently due to various personal complications (back-to-back internships and schooling, constantly moving, aforementioned contractual obligations, and being forced to use Windows for three months a as a development environment which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy). This will change in after November, as I’ll have no obligations whatsoever for the rest of the year.

So why is this thing taking so long?

You can thank Gnome for that.

Gnome has had performance problems and part of the problem is having Javascript, an interpreted GC language, in the same thread as the compositor handling input and drawing to the screen. A hypothetical Gnome 4 would fix those problems, but for now it’s too late for Gnome 3.

Way Cooler would run into similar problems with the current design as of today’s master. I’m looking to fix those problems before they happen by splitting the program up into two binaries: way-cooler the compositor and awesome which acts just like today’s awesome but written in Rust and talking Wayland to way-cooler.

This will mean more work, but a better experience at the end. In fact it already enables a feature that I couldn’t do before with the old system: in place restart of the Lua thread without dropping clients. It’s assumed awesome can be killed and restarted at any time, but way-cooler must always be running.