On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly.

It is called frame. No dependencies, no libraries, no garbage collector. No hot paths, no unnecessary wakeups. When it is idle, it sits still. It shuts up unless spoken to. My kind of software. It clocks in at some 20 thousand lines, and it already runs my whole desktop plus Firefox and GIMP whenever I need that. It is still young, and there is a long list of X protocol left to chew through. But it boots, it draws, and I am typing this on it.

Source: Frame - the first Linux Assembly X server

This is truly admirable. While this is aspirational, I don’t know if I can fully embark on this path. I’ve only started on the GUI apps.