GtkGLArea had numerous downsides that forced us to invent unsightly hacks in our renderer to work around them, most chiefly the fact that it holds its own GdkGLContext on the main thread (GL contexts are not at all thread-safe), forcing us to keep our GL calls on the main thread. It also does not interact well with triple-buffering and initialization is forced to be this sort of deferred song-and-dance since we need to wait for the GLArea to initialize its GL context before we can initialize the renderer, the core surface, and then most things in the GTK surface. We instead invent our own custom widget named RenderSurface that takes simple DMABUFs and displays them. The task of obtaining a GL context falls to manual EGL bindings, since we also need EGL to export OpenGL textures into DMABUFs. We keep the EGL context solely on the render thread meaning that the main thread never concerns itself with rendering except when being notified that the renderer has pushed a new frame. What makes this extra significant is that now the entire GTK apprt no longer depends on OpenGL in any way, shape or form. As long as it is being fed DMABUFs, it can render from whichever graphics API you want. This means we can add more backends based on OpenGL ES or more likely Vulkan rather painlessly in the future. **AI disclosure**: I came up with the idea and let Pi implement most of the nitty-gritty details around EGL, as well as replumbing the renderer and cleaning up all the GTK-specific workarounds there. I then carefully vetted every line of code and spent roughly as much time reviewing as coding. Most of the documentation and all commit messages are in my own words.
Packages
This folder contains packages written for and used by Ghostty that could potentially be useful for other projects. These are in-tree with Ghostty because I don't want to maintain them as separate projects (i.e. get dedicated issues, PRs, etc.). If you want to use them, you can copy and paste them into your project.
License
This license only applies to the contents of the pkg folder within
the Ghostty project. This license does not apply to the rest of the
Ghostty project.
Copyright © 2024 Mitchell Hashimoto, Ghostty contributors
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.