tinywl-clj

A Clojure port of tinywl, a minimal viable Wayland compositor using the wlroots library.

Uses Java 22's java.lang.foreign library (aka Project Panama) to interop with wlroots and other C libraries from Clojure.

Java bindings were generated using jextract.

The goal of this project was to personally learn about the above technologies, and as a proof of concept of porting an (at least slightly) nontrivial program from C to Clojure. Tinywl itself makes no claim to be actually useful as a Wayland compositor.

Prerequisites

• Java 22
• Clojure 1.12-rc1
• wlroots 0.18 (and all it's dependencies) installed.
• Linux

Usage

If you are using Wayland currently you can try out tinywl-clj, it will open a new window inside your existing compositor.

There are several ways to build and run tinywl-clj.

For all the below options you must clone this repo and cd into it.

git clone https://github.com/jjttjj/tinywl-clj
cd tinywl-clj

Container usage

The :podman alias also offers some helper commands to build and run tinywl-clj using podman (which you must have installed)

# arch
clj -X:podman build :file '"build/Dockerfile.arch"' :tag '"tinywl-clj:arch"'
clj -X:podman run :tag '"tinywl-clj:arch"'

# debain
clj -X:podman build :file '"build/Dockerfile.debian"' :tag '"tinywl-clj:debian"'
clj -X:podman run :tag '"tinywl-clj:debian"'

Nix

nix develop
clojure -T:build
clojure -M -m dev.jt.tinywl-clj -s foot

Native usage

To use tinywl-clj natively you will need to have wlroots installed on your system. Your distro might have some wlroots package that might get you a long way there. A sign that you're ready to go would be that libwlroots-0.18.0.so is in one of the directories on your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

clojure -M -m dev.jt.tinywl-clj -s foot
clojure -T:build
clojure -M -m dev.jt.tinywl-clj -s foot