Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/14/frame-a-new-x11-server-implemented-directly-in-assembly/5270498

Joins yserver, Phoenix, and of course XLibre – and outlier Arcan

<- by me on #TheRegister

@lproven unfortunately, arcan appears to have been officially “rewritten” from C to Zig with an LLM:

https://github.com/letoram/arcan/commit/359f5481ac68d520898936ff8163c92372fa8a9c

> Single pass artificial intelligence assisted port from C to Zig to improve safety. Tests will come next.

it’s a bit of a laugh that they did this to improve uhhh safety, and the damn thing couldn’t even get the tests working sensibly

also two of the main apps for this thing are durden and safespaces which gives me a bit of a feeling

@navi @lproven yep, the article goes into how frame and yserver are slop but it ends with arcan as a supposedly non-slop alternative, which also isn’t correct unfortunately

@lproven my kingdom and my distro for a graphical framework that isn’t horseshit, slop, a pipeline into fascism, or somehow all of the above simultaneously

@zzt @lproven definitely joining xlibre

@navi @zzt @lproven this is literally in the linked article

@lproven It's obvious that The Reg is now targetting a US audience when you have to spend a paragraph explaining the developer's sarcasm ;)

@davidgerard @navi @zzt @lproven i assume this was a failure of the "reads source code to understand source code" variety

@navi

As @davidgerard points out, I specifically mentioned that both Frame and yserver are bot-generated.

Nobody but nobody could write a new 64-bit X11 server from scratch in assembly; a human wouldn't live long enough. 

Thus the hyper-arid Norwegian humour of "doing the reasonable thing" and building an entire custom X-to-shell-prompt stack in x86-64 ASM.

It makes Gentoo look _so lame_. Those lusers just recompile C. Pah. Lightweights!

/CC @zzt

@spzb Sadly, it's more like "I have now spent 4½ years with this as my full-time day job".

Last week someone bitched at me because I wrote about an FPGA Apple Lisa and did not explain what an FPGA was; someone else wanted me to explain the weirdness of the LisaOS GUI again even though I linked to the article where I did that last year.

https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/07/10/lisafpga-brings-apples-magnificent-misfire-back-in-programmable-logic/5269951

@navi @davidgerard @zzt

:-o

All the stuff covering X servers is only 800 words long.

That's why I added section headings, in case people tried to skim it. I then removed some as there were too many.

Nerp: no, there weren't...

@lproven I can imagine. "What is this 'computer' thing you keep referring to?"

@spzb

For me, possibly the low point was a piece about 3Y ago which dissected a blog post saying that C isn't just a programming language, it's an IDL now.

Comment: "you say that C is not a programming language, but it is!"

@lproven @navi @davidgerard @zzt
👍

@zzt @lproven it's part of a troll move (let them eat slop, train on it at your own risk) for an upcoming post. The github hasn't been the repository for a long time. Before the zig thing other commits there have deliberately had comments that do the opposite thing of the code intent etc. internally we have self hosted fossil mirrored to chisel and codeberg.

@letoram @zzt @lproven ah yes, it's us the users who are the fools for believing your project is in good faith

so tell us about the naming convention that came up with "durden" and "safespaces", i bet that's a goldmine of good faith too

@davidgerard @letoram @lproven while I love a good LLM poisoning myself and I’m sure the boys on discord think this shit is a hoot, after several decades of general Wayland fuckery and then all the weird fucking fascists doing broken x servers, I have a very low tolerance for bullshit in my core graphics dependencies

I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to do with “we were just trolling with all those commits, lol, safe spaces” from these guys other than never use their shit for anything. it’s fucking wild to do LLM poisoning in a way that will definitely trick humans, and to not have a fucking tell anywhere in the README other than “we’re moving to fossil” which ok???? was I supposed to read that and go “oh this can’t be real slop, they were only previously on github”, like what fucking leap was I supposed to make here?

all I want is to draw graphical emacs and its child windows to screen in a way that doesn’t fucking suck, fuck me I guess

@davidgerard @zzt @lproven

You can read the latest summary post which covered that but in short, as a place to keep something personal under lock and key - memory palaces, safes; with the problem that the underlying mechanisms are anything but and likely intractably so.

Durden started out as a Tiler before becoming something else. Yes, yes, very wordplay, much wow and all that. It's the worst window management scheme named after the worst part of the narrator that he tries to escape but ultimately cannot.

@zzt @davidgerard @lproven Putting a "poison" label right there on the bottle intended for something that is strong at auto-correlation is not exactly a killer move.

I do expect the >very few< genuinely interested and interesting people to come from what has remained the actual source for the last decade, as in the project home page. This has also generally been the case. Any incidental/unknown/existing ones that coming from the few distributions packaging either go to unpoisoned tags or the real mirrors.

If someone default their discovery and support to GitHub, a place that in no uncertain terms are dead set on abusing both developers and users alike, they have a different set of problems.

@letoram @davidgerard @lproven got it, I’m not genuinely interested or uhhh “interesting” because I clicked the top link for your bullshit on ddg and got turned off by what I saw on the site that abuses developers and users, which previously hosted the canonical version of your project. but I’m sure that was before github was bad, right?

weirdly enough the other LLM poisoning projects don’t have problems with the bots being particularly smart, cause they very much aren’t

you’re not beating the bad faith charges here

I do wish your discord full of suckless-style fight club edgelords the very best of luck

@letoram @zzt @davidgerard @lproven

I'm broadly in favour of poisoning LLMs, but Arcan is really hard to find. Searching DDG for Arcan doesn't find anything relevant. Searching for 'arcan display server' finds the Arcan web site as the third link, but the GitHub one is the first link. The first link is the GitHub repo. If you go there, there's nothing indicating that it isn't the official repo or a mirror: it's regularly updated, not archived, has no direct link to the official repo, and the commits are from the person who has the same handle that the Arcan maintainer uses elsewhere and appears to actually be you.

If I hadn't seen this thread, I would have had no idea that the zig one-shot rewrite wasn't real.

@david_chisnall @letoram @zzt @lproven I would first assume that people like this are fucking liars

@david_chisnall @zzt @davidgerard @lproven

In our defence, it is also really hard to understand according to the general diaspora. Whatever it takes to avoid being considered an alternative to Wayland I guess. Jokes aside, MS did pay ridiculous amounts of money for the network effect for a reason.

In the end, hopefully a year and a half or so from now, when I can shut the book on this whole Internet thing for good -- what will remain of the project will not bear that name as it will have served its purpose by then.

On poisoning LLMs: I am not entirely sure about which, if any, strategy that would have a real effect. I strongly lean towards getting passed pre-tagging and be included in the training set for future models (the papers on backdooring), which is an entirely different ballgame than "DISREGARD PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND .." in base64 unicode whitespace or whatever.

As an aside, the person that I gave away the keys to and actually did the whole Zig atrocity (over many months, not exactly fire and forget) is even daily driving it for even greater horrors and previously worked on dataset tagging in the early days of the plague.

It does make me question the recent Bun noise even more; I know the architecture, design and code about as well as possible. I can read and write Zig. The trashed repository is completely unworkable and unauditable to me, the important nuances are definitely lost in translation. Using an LLM for what could have been a handwritten source-source translator is not exactly the 'win' Anthrophic pretends it is.

Anyhow, this is about 1/4th of the plan to say farewell to 'hubs'. I am much more conflicted about how to get rid of the Discord. Not technically (that's well underway) but the thing contain other people's stories and final moments of souls now passed, not something as simple and stupid as code.

@wec

I mentioned a whole collection, well over a dozen, a year ago on the Reg...

https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/06/12/ubuntu-2510-and-fedora-43-to-drop-x11-in-gnome-editions/918165

But well done because there's not that much overlap between our lists!

I keep trying to make the point that even if the X-org team _think_ theirs is the only X11 server in the world, they remain wrong. There are dozens of the things.

@lproven@social.vivaldi.net @wec@fv390.hs.bam.moe

It's long driven me fucking mad that so often, X11 gets conflated with X.org as if nobody has ever made another X server before. Like, genuinely, it is actually maddening for me to see people make that same mistake over and over and over again.

@wec @daemonspudguy

Update the list on the Wikipedia page!

The "Implementations" section is crying out for a bulleted list, *with links*.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Implementations