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I think about using EXWM on a Rapsberry Pi4 as a light weight window manager.

But how light is it really? I do not understand the underlying technology (X, Lisp, ...) enough to make own assumptions about this.

buhtz
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    I think you'll be fine as I doubt a pi4 would blink at EXWM. It depends on the features/paradigm one wants and is willing to sacrifice, but when I personally want lightweight I lean towards something like [dwm](https://dwm.suckless.org/). – nega Oct 27 '21 at 16:43

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My background

I'm a EXWM user; also I have used DWM and I've some background in installing various Linux distributions etc and some theoretical knowledge regarding software performance.

Introduction

First things first, how an OS can impact software performance: various OSes have various strategies to memory-allocate data. So, software that utilizes different data flow/structures in the same computer, but different OS, will have different performances Sulaiman, Raffi (2021). It's not an easy task to say this or that OS is better because it depends on the task, software being used, and a bunch of other variables; also, there is a case of scarse literature benchmarking about the subject.

Case in hand After this prelude, understand that Emacs Lisp is poorly run on Windows, for example, because of Windows File-system.

But, in your case, if you want fast and light, you shouldn't go with EmacsLisp EXWM, but probably DWM written in C. For small applications, and not exceeding complex software architecture, you should always go with C/C++/Rust etc (imperative languages). They run very fast in almost any platform and OS.

Side note not directly related to the topic

Although, I'm a Functional Programming (FP) aficionado, FP in only in it's baby steps being performant-competitive to C/C++ in general programming tasks. It certainly is faster than JavaScript in the web, vide Common Lisp benchmarks and Elm (blaziling fast) but we live in a Object-Oriented-Program-paradigm age, so it's simply overlooked and not taken in consideration when hiring people and choosing technology staks to solve problems. And, therefore, there is little effort to realize all the FP potential in it's fitting domain in Industry. We (FP-inclined people) however should not overlook where imperative languages shine, also; and in your case you are probably facing that scenario.

BuddhiLW
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