User libraries

These are the principle libraries Mir provides compositor authors.

These libraries will not break ABI or API between minor versions of Mir. We do not provide the same guarantees for other, internally used, libraries.

APIs for compositor authors

        classDiagram
    miral --> mircore
    mirwayland --> mircore

    Compositor --> miral
    Compositor --> mirwayland

    class miral["miral (main APIs)"]
    class mirwayland["mirwayland (Extension APIs)"]

    

Mir provides compositor authors with a set of libraries that they can use to build Wayland based shells. These libraries are:

Library	Description
miral	The most commonly used library is miral (the “Mir Abstraction Layer”). This provides an API that makes Mir easy for compositor authors to work with. It provides core window management concepts and an interface that is more ABI stable than Mir’s internal APIs.
mirwayland	Compositor authors may want to define their own wayland protocol extensions in addition to the ones that the core Mir implementation defines. The mirwayland library satisfies this requirement. This library may be used in conjunction with either miral or miroil.
mircore	Fundamental data concepts, like file descriptors and rectangles. These data structures tend not to be Mir-specific.