I'm trying to use Adam's simpledisplay on a mac with XQuartz which is installed + running. When I try to create a window, it crashes when calling XDisplayConnection.get(). I'm just building dub and have added "arsd-official:simpledisplay" as a dependency. Before I installed XQuartz, it wouldn't link because of the X related libs missing, so the XQuartz libs did seem to get installed to the right place. The native cocoa implementation seemed less well tested than the X version so I haven't looked into that too much.

Any idea what's going wrong? Or is there an example that seems to work with the native cocoa version? I'm only planning to use really basic functionality (display an image and maybe capture some key presses)

Also, Adam, if you have an idea of what needs to be done to get native macos support working, I'm willing to try to give it a shot.

object.Exception@../../../.dub/packages/arsd-official-10.3.8/arsd-official/simpledisplay.d(12578): Unable to open X display
----------------
../../../.dub/packages/arsd-official-10.3.8/arsd-official/simpledisplay.d:12578 arsd.simpledisplay.Display* arsd.simpledisplay.XDisplayConnection.get() [0x10f49cc8e]
../../../.dub/packages/arsd-official-10.3.8/arsd-official/simpledisplay.d:13072 void arsd.simpledisplay.SimpleWindow.impl.createWindow(int, int, immutable(char)[], in arsd.simpledisplay.OpenGlOptions, arsd.simpledisplay.SimpleWindow) [0x10f4882ec]
../../../.dub/packages/arsd-official-10.3.8/arsd-official/simpledisplay.d:1688 arsd.simpledisplay.SimpleWindow arsd.simpledisplay.SimpleWindow.__ctor(int, int, immutable(char)[], arsd.simpledisplay.OpenGlOptions, arsd.simpledisplay.Resizability, arsd.simpledisplay.WindowTypes, int, arsd.simpledisplay.SimpleWindow) [0x10f486017]
source/app.d:869 _Dmain [0x10f47dff2]
Program exited with code 1```

On Tuesday, 16 November 2021 at 03:41:31 UTC, Ben Jones wrote:

Hmm, I have never actually seen that fail since the mac will start up the X server on demand.

Nevertheless, you might want to try a few things:

1. run xquartz separately to ensure it is up
2. set hte DISPLAY=:0 environment variable before starting the sdpy app
3. also perhaps try DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0 in case it isn't configured for it

Also possible I bugged it since then though, since it dynamic loads the libs instead of static and I never actually tested that fully on mac. But I think if that was the case you'd get an abort instead of an exception; it wouldn't get to the connection failed step.

I actually don't think the key press functions work anymore, but they are probably fairly easy to fix.

You have to build it without dub so you can pass -version=OSXCocoa to the compiler. Then some things at least should work.

But the Cocoa implementation was contributed to me back in like 2012 and I've spent very little time on it since then. At one point last year, I did get its window working again at least but not much else. It is liable to throw NotYetImplementedExceptions and might have regressed since then too.

I have a mac vm i set up but it is a pain to use so I rarely bother....

So the existing code is an implementation of just the basic featureset built on extern(C) objc_msgSend calls. It is really ugly code and nothing I've added since 2012 works in there at all - anything more than the basic timer is not implemented, no file events, no opengl, no fonts. Even basic window methods probably won't work like maximize and show.

What I'd really like to do is to use dmd's beautiful extern(Objective-C) interface to make the code easier to use. I was kinda hoping those would be added to druntime like core.sys.windows but apparently not. ldc hasn't even implemented the feature at all :( (ive been considering porting it from dmd to ldc myself for like 2 years but it is super low priority since in the rare times i use a mac, im ok with the X server)

But yeah I don't know much about mac development and have a trillion other things to do.

On Tuesday, 16 November 2021 at 14:38:47 UTC, Adam Ruppe wrote:

Adding DISPLAY:0 fixed it, thanks. If I get time, I'll take a look at the objective C stuff, but that's a big if.