Feature request: Expose QApplication.nativeInterface

[Phil Thompson]

So a sip.voidptr object would do?

On 19/08/2025 21:18, Zach Pearson wrote:
> I’m going to pass them down to the C++ layer and put them in
> VkWaylandSurfaceCreateInfoKHR.display and
> VkXcbSurfaceCreateInfoKHR.connection
> 
> — Zach
> 
>> On 19 Aug 2025, at 13:15, Phil Thompson <phil at riverbankcomputing.com> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Yes but I'm obviously not going to provide wrappers for Wayland and 
>> XCB. How are you actually going to use the values?
>> 
>> Phil
>> 
>> On 19/08/2025 18:31, Zach Pearson wrote:
>>> 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