Enlightenment E19 Lands Its New Wayland Compositor Code

Enlightenment fans can celebrate today that the big Enlightenment compositor work has been merged to mainline Enlightenment ahead of the upcoming E19 release.

Prolific Enlightenment developer Chris Michael (a.k.a. "devilhorns") at Samsung merged his "e_comp_wl" branch into mainline Enlightenment (enlightenment.git). This "e_comp_wl" branch contains the rewritten Wayland compositor for Enlightenment. The rewritten version has reduced memory usage and improvements to handling of pixmaps and pointer images, among other improvements. Enlightenment's wl_desktop_shell module also now has XDG_Shell support.

Earlier this year at FOSDEM was the Enlightenment presentation on what it takes to write a Wayland compositor.

The E19 code is currently in an alpha state and it's expected to be officially released later in 2014. Besides the ongoing Wayland work, Enlightenment's E19 also has many other improvements.