Sharing a single wl_display (client) by multiple toolkits

[Victor Berger]

Hi,

I just want to provide some perspective on this issue, which has arisen quite early
I started the Rust bindings.

25 mars 2019 10:20 "Pekka Paalanen" <ppaalanen at gmail.com> a écrit:

> One idea is arguably a hack: the first word pointed to by a wl_proxy
> userdata could be a magic value, that allows the toolkit to identify
> its own userdata.

This is actually pretty similar to how user-data is handled in wayland-rs : the user
data mechanism is actually a typed API, which will refuse access to the user data
(return Option::None) if either the requested type does not match the stored type
or the user-data of the proxy is not threadsafe and access is requested from an other
thread than the one that set it up.

This allows toolkits built on wayland-rs to relatively easily identify if an object
belongs to them or not. Toolkits will mostly use private types as user data, meaning
the risk of a proxy having the proper type as user data while still not belonging to
you is zero.

A second layer of this issue also arose at the level of integration of wayland-rs with
liwayland. wayland-rs tracks more state than libwayland to provide the additional
safety guarantees that an idiomatic Rust API requires. When wayland-rs is used as a
Rust implementation of the protocol, it just does it internally. When it is used as
a wrapper around libwayland, it hijacks the user-data mechanism of libwayland to store
its additional state, and expose its own typed user-data mechanism on top of that.

Wayland-rs thus needs to distinguish objects that were created by it from objects that
were not. To achieve this, given it already uses its own dispatcher function, it simply
stores a magic value in the "implementation" field of the proxy and the actual implementation
along with the rest of its state in the user data. This magic value is a pointer to some
static variable defined in wayland-rs. This allows the crate to distinguish its own objects
from the ones from elsewhere, even other versions of itself (cargo occasionally links different
versions of the same crate into a single binary, treating them as just two different crates).

I don't know how much of a "hack" this all is, but this has worked quite well in practice.

Victor.