I am please to announce a new development version of Cambalache
This comes with two major dependencies changes, the first one is a very basic port to Adwaita which fixes dark mode support with Gtk4
The biggest one is that I have replaced the WebKit WebView used to show widgets in the workspace for a custom Wayland compositor widget based on wlroots.
So far, this is how Cambalache showed windows from a different process in its workspace.
It would run broadwayd or gtk4-broadwayd backend depending on the gtk version of your project and use a WebView to show all the windows.
With the new approach we do not need the extra broadway backend and also we do not need to run a whole web browser just to show a window.
On top of that we get all the obvious optimizations from using Wayland instead of a protocol meant to go over the internet.
For example, with broadway, the client would render the window in memory, the broadway backend would compress the image and sent it over TCP to the webview which has to uncompress it and render it on an HTML5 canvas using JS api.
But now, the client just renders it in shared memory which the compositor use it to create a cairo surface from it and renders it directly in a GtkDrawingArea.
And this is how the new Cambalache looks like when editing its own UI.
This also leaves room for improvement by leveraging all the new Gtk infrastructure for graphics offloading (see this blog post from Matthias about it)
As usual with so many changes I expect new bugs so please if you find any, file them here.
Special thanks goes to emersion, kennylevinsen, vyivel and the wlroots community for their support and awesome project, I would not have been able to do this without wlroots and their help.
Where to get it?
You can get it from Flathub Beta
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo flatpak install flathub-beta ar.xjuan.Cambalache
or checkout main branch at gitlab
git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/cambalache.git
Matrix channel
Have any question? come chat with us at #cambalache:gnome.org
Mastodon
Follow me in Mastodon @xjuan to get news related to Cambalache development.
Happy coding!