Adding Thread Safety to the X Go Binding
Posted on by Andrew Gallant: BurntSushi
The X Go Binding (XGB) is a low level library that provides an API to interact with running X servers. One can only communicate with an X server by sending data over a network connection; protocol requests, replies and errors need to be perfectly constructed down to the last byte. Xlib did precisely this, and then some. As a result, Xlib became huge and difficult to maintain.
In recent years, the XCB project made things a bit more civilized by generating C code from XML files describing the X client protocol using Python. While the Python to generate said code is no walk in the park, it is typically preferred to the alternative: keeping the X core protocol up to date along with any number of extensions that exist as well. (There are other benefits to XCB, like easier asynchronicity, but that is beyond the scope of this post.)
XGB proceeds in a similar vain; Python is used to generate Go code that provides an API to interact with the X protocol. Unlike its sister project XCB, it is not thread safe. In particular, if X requests are made in parallel, the best case scenario is a jumbled request or reply and the worst case scenario is an X server crash. Parallel requests can be particularly useful when images are being sent to the X server to be painted on the screen; other useful work could be done in the interim.