Webrender as native toolkit for wayland

[coderkalyan]

Hey guys, since webrender is efficient, GPU accelerated, and flexible, I was wondering if it would be possible for me to use it as a native toolkit for wayland? 1) I'm thinking something like electron, except only as a UI toolkit, no JS - just native application code. 2) I would like to be able to use it natively with wayland if possible, instead of resorting to an xwayland layer. For wayland, basically webrender needs to be able to connect to an EGL layer and render to that.

Is using it as a native toolkit and/or with wayland possible? Advice is appreciated!

[jrmuizel]

It's definitely possible to WebRender on Wayland as WebRender will just use any GL context that you give. (Firefox happily uses WebRender on Wayland)

However, WebRender alone is insufficient to act as toolkit. It basically just does drawing. If you want a toolkit based on WebRender I'd recommend looking at https://github.com/maps4print/azul/ or https://github.com/tiffany352/moxie-native

[coderkalyan]

Thanks @jrmuizel I'll take a look into those toolkits as a reference! How do I initialize/connect webrender on wayland? Any specific code/environment/boilerplate?

[coderkalyan]

Also, what would be the memory footprint of using webrender as a toolkit, as compared to something like GTK? One issue I had with electron is its memory consumption, but i assumed that was mostly due to the V8 JS runtime.

[jrmuizel]

Like I said earlier, there's no windowing system specific code in WebRender. You can take a look at https://github.com/servo/webrender/blob/master/examples/basic.rs for a simple example.

It doesn't really make sense to compare memory consumption of WebRender to GTK as GTK is a full toolkit and memory usage will depend heavily on the particular usage.

[coderkalyan]

@jrmuizel Oh, okay! Sorry, got a bit confused. What I'm actually looking for is some way to write a UI toolkit which can be expressed in terms of an HTML DOM and CSS stylesheet(s), like electron does. I would like to use servo's webrender, pathfinder, html5ever, and css engine to do so... any suggestions? Does servo abstract a module where I could tap into the entire rendering pipeline without touching the javascript stuff or browser-specific stuff?

[jdm]

Servo does not expose that. It's an idea that has been discussed before in issues like servo/servo#3646 and servo/servo#7379 but it is not a focus of the Servo project for the foreseeable future.

[coderkalyan]

@jdm thanks for the clarification! How much work do you think it would be for me to implement my own "glue" code using the individual rendering crates under servo?

[jdm]

Lots.