Wayland tutorial for beginners in pure C

How to build a Wayland client and create a window from scratch using pure C.

Wayland tutorial for beginners in pure C Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager. Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a secure and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The project's source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software license. The Wayland project also develops an implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston. The Wayland Display Server project was created by Red Hat developer Kristian Høgsberg in 2008. Beginning around 2010, Linux desktop graphics have moved from having "a pile of rendering interfaces... all talking to the X server, which is at the center of the universe" towards putting the Linux kernel and its components (i.e. Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), Direct Rendering Manager (DRM)) "in the middle", with "window systems like X and Wayland ... off in the corner". This will be "a much-simplified graphics system offering more flexibility and better performance". Høgsberg could have added an extension to X as many recent projects have done, but preferred to "[push] X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware" for reasons explained in the project's FAQ: What's different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango, etc.), and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process. ... [An X server has] a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. ... This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!), and the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extension such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE ... With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path. Getting to a point where the X server is a compatibility option instead of the core rendering system will take a while, but we'll never get there if [we] don't plan for it. The Wayland protocol is represented through a .xml file which comes with the Wayland compiler, which can compile the wayland.xml file into relevant C libraries for applications and compositor implementations to use. The official reference implementation for a Wayland compositor is named Weston. The proje