"If you want something done, do it yourself", as said one of the best sci-fi movie villains.
A GUI toolkit that does not burden itself with compatibility with anything but X (working directly with Xlib) is already much leaner than GTK or Qt. The use of Common Lisp instead of C, Vala, or even C++ makes the problem even easier to tackle. No wonder Barium ended up being so compact, while doing everything a simple but complete toolkit needs to do.
It may even age gracefully, as the author wants it to, provided that Xlib stays around. Or maybe it could eventually develop a thin abstraction layer to allow pluggable rectangle-drawing and text-rendering APIs, and start supporting Wayland, too.
And emphatically yes, I want scrollbars back where scrollbars are due. Aping Apple in this regard was a very unfortunate choice by GTK.
87
58