Feature request: Expose QApplication.nativeInterface

[Zach Pearson]

In the Qt6 C++ documentation, QX11Application.connection() returns the X connection of the application (for XCB), and QWaylandApplication.display() returns the wl_display connection of the application. 

(X11) https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qnativeinterface-qx11application.html
(Wayland) https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qnativeinterface-qwaylandapplication.html 

— Zach

> On 19 Aug 2025, at 03:32, Phil Thompson <phil at riverbankcomputing.com> wrote:
> 
> On 18/08/2025 21:59, Zach Pearson wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I was experimenting with making a toy Vulkan renderer with Python
>> bindings, but I hit a roadblock creating surfaces on Linux. On macOS
>> or Windows, you only need your desired window’s window_id to create a
>> surface on it. But when you go to generate Vulkan surfaces on Linux
>> you have to pass in handles to the program’s connection to the
>> windowing system, and you have to get those from
>> QApplication.instance().nativeInterface(). Depending on whether you’re
>> using ‘wayland’ as your qt platform or ‘xcb’, you get back either
>> QWaylandApplication or QX11Application, and then you can call
>> display() or connection() respectively to get the data you need.
>> On PySide6 using ‘xcb’ as the qt platform, you get a native interface
>> back when you call QApplication.instance().nativeInterface(), though
>> when using ‘wayland’ that call returns None (they plan to actually
>> return QWaylandApplication in PySide6 6.10). On PyQt, I get an error
>> ‘QApplication has no attribute nativeInterface’.
>> Could you expose that attribute in a future release of PyQt6?
> 
> What would display() or connection() have to return to make them useful?
> 
> Phil