wayland-explorer VS Pion WebRTC

Wayland is good until you hit the corner cases that they decided to abandon, without leaving any alternatives. We can always have extra protocol that can be optionally enabled, but good luck with standardizing that. It feels as if Wayland people are abusing their committee to keep Wayland as-is, instead of extending it. The protocol dashboard[1] doesn't look exactly good.

[1]: https://wayland.app/protocols/

Wayland is itself an IPC system (that uses UNIX domain sockets). I would make a custom Wayland protocol (if there isn't already an appropriate one available, look here: https://wayland.app/protocols/). You can define the protocol in XML and generate the boilerplate code in C using wayland-scanner. I assume smithay also has an equivalent of wayland-scanner.

https://wayland.app/protocols/ and https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ are just API references.

Given I will be using most of the Wayland protocol to achieve anything (it's minimal) and Wayland is well specified then the 'start at the bottom and build up' design pattern fits. Wayland has a wire protocol based on a Unix socket, and usefully Java has supported Unix sockets since release 16, so I can write everything in Java to (de)serialise messages. This gets me going quickly, providing positive feedback that I'm on the right track..

The core is bare-bones, there are numerous standard protocols since, and many other are in standardization. Here is a site to review their state: https://wayland.app/protocols/

There is some lock-in in some places where tools adopt a protocol that is only implemented by wlroots compositors, or only implemented by KDE, etc, but I suspect this will improve over time as protocols stabilise ( and you can browse the available protocols here: https://wayland.app/protocols/ )

This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite.

A few key points:

1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns out real world use leads to "useless" features being reimplemented.

2) he complains about how X.org has broad hardware compatibility. As if that's a bad thing. Meanwhile wayland, even now it still doesn't work reliably on half the graphics chips on the market.

3) It complains that certain X features are not fully network transparent. True, but most are and you can detect at runtime and gracefully degrade. Wayland "fixes" this by just dropping the whole feature.

4) it flat-out lies saying the X server does nothing yet it is so much hard to maintain code. The core X protocol provides backward compatibility and is rock solid (and really easy to impelment from scratch btw, someone did it in Javascript for a tutorial for crying out loud). Meanwhile the Wayland compositor keeps accumulating everything because of point 1. Need a screenshot? Add it it the compositor. Need a hotkey? Add it to the compositor. Need drag and drop? Add it to the compositor. Need a notification icon? Add it to the compositor. In X, all those are peer to peer. Graphics are actually a relatively small part of a graphical user interface, something Wayland is still slow to learn.

5) He complains that certain applications are written inefficiently with blocking calls which is inefficient over a network connection. Wayland's calls are ALL blocking and just has no network connection.

6) Complains that X may draw things unnecessarily. Indeed... but there's an extension to disable that. Easy fix. Wayland even uses the same drivers!

So that brings me to Wayland Protocols!. In X11 land, X11 defines a lot of behaviors for you. There is no such definition in Wayland-land by design - this is to give compositors a lot more freedom and flexibility in how they function. It also means that it required time for protocols to develop to cover all of the things that we would need in a desktop window compositor to bring it up to snuff for desktop usage. These protocols evolved through the past 4-5 years of everybody seeing it's shortcomings on a Desktop system compared to a mobile phone based UI. With the latest fractional scaling protocol we have more or less finally "closed the gap" between Wayland and Xorg on the desktop - it's just a matter of compositors implementing full support for all of the protocols people want.

I am really excited about https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer. It has examples ready for ESP32 etc....

When working on KVS I wasn't familiar with the embedded space at all. I saw 'heavyweight' embedded where you were running on Linux. Then you had RTOS/No OS at all. I wasn't prepared for these devices at all. If we can make WebRTC work in the embedded space I think it will really accelerate what developers are able to build!

Remotely driven cars, security cameras, robots in hospitals that bring iPads to infectious patients etc... Creative people are building amazing things. The WebRTC/video space needs to work harder and support them :)

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I love how diverse the WebRTC space is now. Outside of this implementation you have plenty of other options!

* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc (Typescript)

* https://github.com/pion/webrtc (Golang)

* https://github.com/webrtc-rs/webrtc (Rust)

* https://github.com/algesten/str0m (Rust)

* hhttps://github.com/sepfy/libpeer (C/Embedded)

* https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/ (C++)

* https://github.com/sipsorcery-org/sipsorcery (C#)

* https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel (C++)

* https://github.com/elixir-webrtc (Elixir)

* https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc (Python)

* GStreamer’s webrtcbin (C)

See https://github.com/sipsorcery/webrtc-echoes for examples of some running against each other.

I have worked four jobs related to https://github.com/pion/webrtc and one for https://webrtcforthecurious.com

Two companies used Pion. The other two were just using the protocol (WebRTC)

In my experience Go has been relatively approachable for people that are good at PHP. It has a great standard library and a pretty solid ecosystem, though frameworks aren’t as popular in Go. There are some well regarded libraries for things like WebRTC via https://github.com/pion/webrtc WebSicket via https://github.com/nhooyr/websocket

Don't try to make RTC yourself, it looks easy, but in fact, it's a really hard problem to solve. Use https://pion.ly/ it's a pretty solid package they also have a discord/slack channel with a lot of helpful people there.

Maybe you can reuse some of this code: https://github.com/pion/webrtc/blob/master/examples/data-channels/main.go