WaylandSharp 0.1.0

WaylandSharp

An incremental source generator to automatically create bindings to Wayland using given protocol xml files.

wayland.xml should always be included to the list.

Getting started

Install WaylandSharp nuget package.

dotnet add package WaylandSharp

Grab wayland.xml from freedesktop.org. Drop the file into your project.

Add this to your csproj

<PropertyGroup>
  
  <AllowUnsafeBlocks>true</AllowUnsafeBlocks>
</PropertyGroup>

<ItemGroup>
  <CompilerVisibleItemMetadata Include="AdditionalFiles" MetadataName="WaylandProtocol" />
  <AdditionalFiles Include="wayland.xml" WaylandProtocol="client" />
</ItemGroup>

No support for generating server-side bindings yet.

Benefit! 🍞

Quick Guide

Connection to a wayland display server can be established by calling:

WlDisplay.Connect(string);

Global objects can be retrieved by creating a registry object and listening for Global event

using wlDisplay = WlDisplay.Connect();
using wlRegistry = wlDisplay.GetRegistry();

wlRegistry.Global += (_, e) =>
{
    Console.WriteLine($"{e.Name}:{e.Interface}:{e.Version}");
};

wlDisplay.Roundtrip();

Either a WlDisplay.Roundtrip() or WlDisplay.Dispatch() is required to generate event invocations. In this case, Global event will occur upon calling Roundtrip().

As described in Wayland's official docs, WlDisplay.Roundtrip() dispatches all currently pending events. If no events are pending, the function returns 0, otherwise it returns the number of pending events that were processed. This internally calls Sync and waits for the server's callback before returning.

On the other hand, Dispatch will block until there are events to process, as such, it will never return 0. It is useful for setting up an event loop, like in this example below.

while (someWlDisplayInstance.Dispatch() != -1)
{
    // intentionally empty
}

Binding to global objects are done by using the data received from GlobalEventArgs, specifically Name (a unique uint given by the server for this instance of global object), Interface (the contract used), and Version and passing it as the arguments of WlRegistry.Bind().

As an example, assuming that the user wants to bind to a wl_output

wlRegistry.Global += (_, e) =>
{
    if (e.Interface == WlInterface.WlOutput.Name)
    {
        // Passing a version is optional, it'll use the version specified in
        // the protocol xml by default.
        using var wlOutput = wlRegistry.Bind<WlOutput>(e.Name, e.Interface);

        // do something about wlOutput here.
    }
};

A helper function will be introduced in the future to help shorten this specific pattern.