Smithay/smithay

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3196 stars · 366 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Smithay is a Rust library providing building blocks for creating Wayland compositors, implementing core Wayland protocols and common extensions in a modular, high-level way. It is not a full compositor itself but ships with a sample compositor (anvil) and powers projects like the Cosmic desktop environment.

Use cases

• build a custom wayland compositor in rust
• create a linux desktop environment from scratch
• implement wayland protocol extensions in a display server
• develop a mobile wayland compositor
• prototype a window manager without writing low-level wayland code

When to choose

• you want to write a Wayland compositor in Rust with memory safety guarantees
• you need modular building blocks rather than an opinionated framework
• you want high-level abstractions over core Wayland protocols and wlroots/KDE extensions

When to avoid

• you need a ready-to-use desktop compositor rather than a library
• you are building an X11 window manager rather than a Wayland compositor
• you prefer C/C++ ecosystems like wlroots

Facets

library · maturity active

graphics gui developer-tools graphics desktop-applications cross-platform operating-systems rust cpp wayland wayland-compositor display-server rust compositor-library linux-desktop linux

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