Concerns Regarding the Choice of Rust for the Xfce Wayland Compositor

[Timothy Gaskell]

Speaking only for myself as an Xfce user, I do really appreciate how Xfce
is simple enough that it has been very easy to port and has ended up
running on everything from GNU/HURD to RedoxOS sooner than larger desktops.
But I don't think xfwl4 being written in Rust undermines this at all. If
anyone is struggling to get Rust up on their system, the X11 session is
right there and doesn't need it.

Regards,
Timothy Gaskell
Happy XFCE 4.20 user

On Wed, 17 Jun 2026, 4:47 pm Brian Tarricone, <brian at tarricone.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 17, 2026, at 14:07, Wojciech S. Czarnecki wrote:
>
> >> I'm not sure what the solution is here, if there is one.
> >
> > No external dependencies.  Vendor and vet everything. (Still vulnerable
> > to the toolchain intrusions, but)
>
> Completely unrealistic for a project like Xfce, so this isn't even worth
> considering.
>
> >> > Xfce has always been trusted because its codebase is relatively small
> and auditable.
> >>
> >> This feels like a bit of a stretch to me.  Do people really think about
> Xfce in these terms?
> >
> > I do.
>
> I meant that as a general/statistical question.  If the answer is "30% of
> Xfce users care about this" then sure, that would mean I'd want to consider
> that more carefully.  But if it's 1% -- which I suspect is much closer to
> the truth -- then I can't really put much emphasis on this, given my own
> limited time and resources.
>
> Regards,
> Brian
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