45 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
45 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
Resources used in the production of this program:
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- [The XCB Reference from FreeDesktop](https://xcb.freedesktop.org/manual/index.html)
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- [The Xorg Basic Programming with the XCB
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Library](https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/libxcb/tutorial/index.html),
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- [The KDE Source Code for
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XCBWrapper](https://github.com/KDE/libkscreen/tree/master/backends), [Vlad Zahorodnii](https://github.com/zzag) et. al., ongoing.
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- [The source code to xedgewarp](https://github.com/Airblader/xedgewarp), [Ingo Burke](https://github.com/Airblader)
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- [C++ in a
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Nutshell](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/c-in-a/059600298X/)
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Ray Lischner, O'Reilly Publishing, 2003
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The sheer variety of sources I needed to cobble together an
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understanding how the XCB library works is an example of what teachers
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call [extrinsic
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load](https://betterhumans.pub/skyrocket-your-learning-top-3-studying-techniques-based-on-cognitive-load-theory-1641b5e56508),
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an unnecessary extra load on learning because the documentation is
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poorly organized and lacks instruction. *Basic Programming with XCB*
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is a
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*[tutorial](https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-of-documentation-and-why-you-need-to-understand-what-they-are-daniele-procida/)*
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oriented toward commonplace tasks, but peters out before getting to an
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XCB extensions such as RandR. The reference is a *reference*; it
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doesn't help you understand how to use the library. `XCBWrapper` is
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an excellent example of how to use XCB, but it uses some fairly
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high-level C++ to accomplish all that it does, and untangling the
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relationship between the wrapper template, the macro that does wrapper
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declarations, and the XCB Reference, was quite a challenge; once you
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find the insight that XCB's declarations are all derived from a
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massive XML file, you can start to understand that XCBWrapper exploits
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the patterns produced by the derivative file, but it requires insight
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and effort that's unrelated to understanding XCB in the first place.
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This project does show the usual trajectory of one of my learning
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exercises, especially since I'm fond of delving in places where no man
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has documented before. I've dumped a ton of stuff into my brain and
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now it's all starting to make sense. I also note that I'm doing
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_better_ than a lot of the open-source examples, in that I'm batching
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many of my requests before processing them. I'm not batching storing
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the replies yet, but I don't see why that couldn't happen.
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I did attempt at one point to start using `std::unique_ptr` to
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automatically free `_reply_t` objects that XCB allocated for me, but
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after playing with them for an hour or so my initial impression is
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that I'm utterly thrilled with Rust's ergonomics. Just sayin'.
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