syphon-core

Core Rust bindings to Syphon — the open-source macOS framework for sharing video frames between applications in real time with zero-copy GPU efficiency.

This crate provides safe wrappers around the Syphon Objective-C API: SyphonServer, SyphonClient, Frame, and SyphonServerDirectory, plus helpers for IOSurface and Metal device discovery.

macOS only. Requires Syphon.framework to be available at link/run time (see Requirements).

Features

• SyphonServer — publish IOSurface-backed frames; optional private servers via ServerOptions { is_private: true }.
• SyphonClient — connect by name or by ServerInfo (UUID, never ambiguous), receive frames push-based with newFrameHandler.
• SyphonServerDirectory — enumerate available servers.
• Zero-copy access — Frame::iosurface() exposes the shared GPU memory so you can alias it as a Metal texture (see syphon-metal).

Example

use syphon_core::{SyphonServer, SyphonClient, SyphonServerDirectory};

// Publish frames
let server = SyphonServer::new("My App", 1920, 1080)?;
server.publish_iosurface(&my_surface)?;

// Discover servers
for info in SyphonServerDirectory::servers() {
    println!("Found: {} ({})", info.name, info.app_name);
}

// Connect and receive
let client = SyphonClient::connect("Resolume Arena")?;
if let Some(frame) = client.try_receive()? {
    println!("{}x{}", frame.width, frame.height);
}
# Ok::<(), syphon_core::SyphonError>(())

Requirements

• macOS 10.13+ with a Metal-capable GPU
• Xcode Command Line Tools
• Syphon.framework installed in /Library/Frameworks (or otherwise on the framework search path). This ships with most Syphon-enabled apps, or build it from the Syphon-Framework repo. The build script also probes a sibling syphon-lib/Syphon.framework for local workspace development.

Feature flags

• logging — cap log output at warn in release builds.
• max_perf — compile out all logging in release builds.

License

MIT. Part of the syphon-rs workspace.