rust-windowing / rust-windowing/winit

Make `Window` `!Send + !Sync`

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C - needs discussion S - api
Dominant language
Rust
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Description

Part of https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/3367, opening to discuss separately.

We've worked hard on trying to make Window safely Send + Sync, but this somewhat obscures what's really happening underneath the hood: Some backends use Mutex, others like macOS/iOS dispatch the events to the main thread (and you may even deadlock if you try to use the window from a thread while the event loop is not running).

So maybe this is actually the wrong solution, and windows should not actually be Send + Sync? Though if we remove it, we'll still have to find some way of allowing users to render on different threads.

Are there other use-cases for Send + Sync windows (other than rendering)?

Related: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/3317, https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/3434.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the discussions in issues #3367, #3317, and #3434, then examine how the current Window threading guarantees interact with backend event dispatch. Done would be a resolved design direction for the Send/Sync decision and a clear account of how rendering on other threads should work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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