MVmvladic·Sep 25, 2022
Unfortunately, repository https://github.com/magcius/xplain is archived and the latest update is from 5 years ago.
In Olive.c: a simple graphics library that does not have any dependenciesmagcius
xplain
JavaScript2013–2022
magcius / xplain · Archived
xplain
Interactive demos
6Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
773GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Interactive demos
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-12-29 16:14:59 UTC to 2022-09-25 16:06:26 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesAuthor here. I stopped working on this a few years ago, so now's as good a time as any for an overly-long, rambly, unedited retrospective.
When I started this, I was working on GNOME's window manager full-time, and wanted to learn intricately how X11's drawing model worked, so over the course of a few weeks in a hotel room, I recreated large parts of X11's drawing model in a web browser, fixing artifacts as I went along, until I feel I had a really good grasp of it. My initial test scene was a traditional desktop-like approach with a taskbar and xeyes, both of which are still in the codebase today, but untested [0].
I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, until I settled upon using snippets of it to build a long-form article. I learned a lot about the difficulty of writing, of pedagogy, of that blurred line between being technically co
Read the rest
rrect 100% of the time vs. telling a few small lies here and there to keep the flow consistent and help people see the broader picture.
At my day job, I had mostly moved onto Wayland, where some of the bits I picked up here really helped me design better protocols and systems. My goal with the series was to try to be as neutral as possible, and my original design was to have a giant caution sign around "Author Opinion Zones" where I would talk about how certain design features haven't held up well in practice. But quickly, people on Hacker News or Phoronix or Reddit seemed to skim the article, pick up a piece here or there, and go on straight to bashing Wayland, gleefully unaware that I was one of the people making it.
So, the end result was that I basically stopped working on Xplain basically after the second article. The COMPOSITE article was one I made after a colleague was having trouble understanding COMPOSITE, and I figured it was easier to write with my framework than explain in a chatroom, and maybe some others would appreciate it.
I have a deep passion for sharing my knowledge, and Xplain was the format I first really used to do it widely, so I tried to keep it exciting for me by changing it from "Xplain" to "Explanations", and opening up the topics from X11 to just about anything, but at some point I was just unhappy working on it.
The last thing I was working on was a continuation of my Basic 2D rasterization article, where I had a fun code editor you could use to make your own graphics [1] [2], but as fun as the technology was, I couldn't find a satisfying flow to the article, so I stopped it. Parts of it were later recycled for an article on the histories of 2D and 3D graphics. [3]
Around mid-2016, I had stopped working on Linux and open-source graphics entirely, and by 2017 I had exited the open-source industry completely and jumped ship to professional game development. I still have a deep love for graphics and a passion to explain things. I just released a new side project a few days ago for it, even.
Here's some stuff I'm working on these days. It's much cooler than X11/Wayland flamewars, in my opinion.
https://noclip.website/
https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k
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[0] https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh-pages/src/clients/...
[1] https://u.teknik.io/XdSbC.webm
[2] Sort of up here at https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/rast2.html
[3] https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde...
There is another great resource mainly about X11 called Xplain[1] with its accompanying repository[2] with some hidden (not yet ready I suppose) chapters. For example the override-redirect description[3].
[1]: https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/
[2]: https://github.com/magcius/xplain
[3]: https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/menu.html
In Linux Graphics Demystified (2014) [pdf]It's a simulation of an X server done with JavaScript. The README.md explains it in a bit more detail: https://github.com/magcius/xplain#demo-framework--xserverjs
Basically, I emulate what an X server would do, semantically, without implementing any of the actual wire protocol. The codebase is, I hope, pretty well commented and designed as something to learn from.
https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh-pages/src/server/s...
In Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of usI don't have social media, and GitHub issues are indeed acceptable for giving public feedback of any sort, though I understand not all projects are ran this way. I clarified this point:
https://github.com/magcius/xplain/commit/91fde0e87116ec834f1...
In Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of usThat project is a labor of love and the author asked for very little in return, but he did ask for it, publicly: https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh-pages/article/regi...
Had he asked for money, I probably would not have sent any. But he asked for something that I can provide with ease, so I did. And I enjoyed it.
Is that really what this is about? Is it wrong to do good if it might benefit the do-gooder in some way? Can we all take a collective moment to think critically about that? :)
(anyway, you're wrong(ish?). Posting an issue does not appear to have added my name to https://github.com/magcius/xplain/graphs/contributors . Though I could have sworn that I've seen what you are talking about happen before. \shrug\, that's github's fault.)
In Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of usI wrote the server from scratch JavaScript, and I can't verify its accuracy towards real server behavior:
https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh-pages/src/server/s...
It's fake in a lot of ways, especially in its input model. It's well-commented and designed as a codebase to learn from, not as a real implementation of an X server that's reusable.
In XPlain – Explaining X11 for the rest of usThis article was last updated in May 2014:
https://github.com/magcius/xplain/commits/gh-pages
In XPlain – Explaining X11 for the rest of usTo see what?
Note that the window under it, with its white background, actually has a setTimeout when it repaints:
https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh-pages/src/article-...
Without that, even in a slow JavaScript implementation, you can barely see the white background.
As I explain in the article, this is entirely because of memory pressure limits of the 80s. This is what Windows 7 does too. And in a modern environment (compositing manager), windows do get their own backing pixel memory.
In Xplain: Explaining X11 for the rest of usYou could follow progress via Github repo: https://github.com/magcius/xplain
In Xplain: Explaining X11 for the rest of us