X11 rust bindings

Feel free to open issues for any problems or questions you might have.

Building

This crate depends on xcb-proto. It uses pkg-config to find it. In a nutshell, if you can run pkg-config --modversion xcb-proto successfully, you should be fine.

On Debian, the necessary packages are called pkg-config, xcb-proto, and python-xcbgen. I hope that other distros use similarly obvious naming.

Motivation

(The image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License)

My main motivation for writing this library is fun and getting some experience with Rust. As such, "there is already a library" does not count.

However, since you brought this topic up, let us look at some other libraries that allow accessing an X11 server from Rust. If you know about more libraries or want me to know that I got something wrong, feel free to tell me about them, for example by opening an issue.

xproto-rs

I only found this on crates.io. The Repository link is broken and documentation looks like someone dumped the result of bindgen on the Xlib headers into a crate.

xrb

The Pure Rust bindings for X11 seem to contain hand-written code for parsing and sending X11 messages. Also, its README currently claims that this project is in an early state.

x11-rs

This seems to provide FFI wrappers around Xlib and various related libraries. I recently heard about this library because its unsafe code is unsound and causes undefined behaviour. This is basically all I know and heard about this library.

rust-xcb

This project uses xcb-proto, the XML description of the X11 protocol that comes from the libxcb project. Based on this XML, code is generated that provides a foreign function interface to the various libxcb libraries. Due to its FFI nature, this project contains many instances of unsafe. Worse, its basic_window example indicates that users of this library must also use unsafe for handling events. How can one ever be sure that there is nothing wrong with the unsafe one writes?

I briefly looked at this project and found a NULL pointer dereference and re-discovered an already known leak.

x11rb (this project)

x11rb, the x11 rust bindings, is based on the XML description of the X11 protocol that comes from the libxcb project, similar to rust-xcb. However, instead of providing a foreign function interface to libxcb, the generated code reimplements the serialising and unserialising code that is provided by libxcb. libxcb is only used for receiving and sending opaque packets.

This reimplementation is done without any uses of unsafe and thus should enjoy Rust's usual safety guarantees. After all, the best way to trust the unsafe code coming out of your code generator is if your code generator does not generate any unsafe code.

This means that this project is even safer than libxcb, because libxcb forces its users to blindly trust length fields that come from the X11 server.

The downside of this is possibly slower code. However, if your bottleneck is in talking to the X11 server, you are seriously doing something wrong.

Examples of the generated code can be found here. Feel free to suggest improvements to it.

Does this support async/await

No. If you have so many X11 connections that this would matter, you are doing something wrong. Also, it encourages people to write high-latency code instead of sending multiple requests and only afterwards wait for the replies.

Current state

The core X11 protocol and some extensions already work. There are some known problems and not all extensions are provided. For more information, have a look at the known issues.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.