Hello, yesterday I officially released Louvre v1.0.0, a C++ library designed for building Wayland compositors with a primary focus on ease of development. It provides a default method for handling protocols, input events, and rendering, which you can selectively and progressively override as required, allowing you to see a functional compositor from day 1.
It supports multi-GPU setups, multi-session (TTY switching), and offers various rendering options, including a scene and view system that automatically repaints only the damaged (changing) regions during a frame. Because it uses multiple threads, it can maintain a high FPS rate with v-sync enabled when rendering complex scenarios. In contrast, single-threaded compositors often experience a rapid drop in FPS, for example, from 60 to 30 fps, due to “dead times” while waiting for a screen vblank, leading to the skipping of frames.
The library is freely available, open source, thoroughly documented, includes examples, and features a detailed tutorial.
You can find it here: https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre
I hope it proves useful for you. If you decide to use it and encounter any doubts or wish to contribute to its development, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Greetings!
You mentioned it being easier then wlroots, but wayfire and phoc reportedly act as high level abstractions on top of wlroots that could be used to make it easier to create window managers (wayfire author explicitly mentioned it), Maybe it will be good to create a comparison with these projects? or even divert your future efforts to one of them?
I’m not sure if I explicitly mentioned that it’s easier than wlroots, but I believe its design can considerably ease the learning curve for newcomers. While I’ve read about those projects, I haven’t had the chance to try them myself. Although I’d be interested in contributing to their development, I don’t intend to abandon Louvre. I find it beneficial that there are different alternatives, as each can bring unique and clever ideas to enhance various aspects, ultimately improving the overall design across the board.