wl_display

\class wl_display

\brief Represents a connection to the compositor and acts as a proxy to the wl_display singleton object.

A wl_display object represents a client connection to a Wayland compositor. It is created with either \ref wl_display_connect() or \ref wl_display_connect_to_fd(). A connection is terminated using \ref wl_display_disconnect().

A wl_display is also used as the \ref wl_proxy for the wl_display singleton object on the compositor side.

A wl_display object handles all the data sent from and to the compositor. When a \ref wl_proxy marshals a request, it will write its wire representation to the display's write buffer. The data is sent to the compositor when the client calls \ref wl_display_flush().

Incoming data is handled in two steps: queueing and dispatching. In the queue step, the data coming from the display fd is interpreted and added to a queue. On the dispatch step, the handler for the incoming event set by the client on the corresponding \ref wl_proxy is called.

A wl_display has at least one event queue, called the <em>default queue</em>. Clients can create additional event queues with \ref wl_display_create_queue() and assign \ref wl_proxy's to it. Events occurring in a particular proxy are always queued in its assigned queue. A client can ensure that a certain assumption, such as holding a lock or running from a given thread, is true when a proxy event handler is called by assigning that proxy to an event queue and making sure that this queue is only dispatched when the assumption holds.

The default queue is dispatched by calling \ref wl_display_dispatch(). This will dispatch any events queued on the default queue and attempt to read from the display fd if it's empty. Events read are then queued on the appropriate queues according to the proxy assignment.

A user created queue is dispatched with \ref wl_display_dispatch_queue(). This function behaves exactly the same as wl_display_dispatch() but it dispatches given queue instead of the default queue.

A real world example of event queue usage is Mesa's implementation of eglSwapBuffers() for the Wayland platform. This function might need to block until a frame callback is received, but dispatching the default queue could cause an event handler on the client to start drawing again. This problem is solved using another event queue, so that only the events handled by the EGL code are dispatched during the block.

This creates a problem where a thread dispatches a non-default queue, reading all the data from the display fd. If the application would call \em poll(2) after that it would block, even though there might be events queued on the default queue. Those events should be dispatched with \ref wl_display_dispatch_pending() or \ref wl_display_dispatch_queue_pending() before flushing and blocking.

extern (C) nothrow
struct wl_display

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