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13771 :: ybus: a pure-Nim DBus client

• xTrayambak (orginal) [2026-03-08T15:45:20+01:00] view original

  Heya,

  One of my biggest gripes with Nim since the past few months has been the lack of a Nim-native DBus library. I was once talking about it with a friend a few months back, and they just told me to write one myself since it's not that complex. I'd been holding onto it for a while, but I'm finally done with it, coincidentally just around the time @ASVI released their own library.

  ybus is a D-Bus package that ships:

  • a XML -> Nim protocol wrapper generator
  • a synchronous client that handles authentication and bus registration for you
  • Variant serialization and deserialization
  • full support for user bus path resolution (besides abstract keys)

  ...all in ~1100 lines of Nim. A few things are remaining here and there, but most of the core has been solidly laid.

  bindgen

  If you wished to write some Nim code targetting org.freedesktop.Notifications to send notifications from your Nim app, you can run:

  
  $ bindgen -I /org/freedesktop/Notifications org.freedesktop.Notifications > notifs.nim
  Run

  then, in your main source file:

  
  import std/[options, tables]
  import notifs
  import pkg/ybus/client/unix_sync
  
  var client = newBusClient()
  client.connect()
  
  echo get client.getServerInformation() # e.g on GNOME: @["gnome-shell", "GNOME", "49.3", "1.2"]
  echo get client.getCapabilities() # e.g on GNOME: @["actions", "body", "body-markup", "icon-static", "persistence", "sound"]
  echo get client.notify(
    "ybus",
    0'u32,
    "org.gnome.Nautilus",
    "hello, ybus!",
    "this was sent through the autogenerated Notifications API bindings (bindgen)",
    @[],
    initTable[string, Variant](),
    5000'i32,
  ) # send a notification to the user
  Run

  .. image:: https://files.catbox.moe/yw6idi.png

  bindgen can essentially introspect a service on your system (if it supports it), get its interface' XML and generate Nim bindings targetting ybus for it, making it pretty neat and native-y.

  Source Code: https://github.com/nim-windowing/ybus

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• ASVI (orginal) [2026-03-08T19:17:44+01:00] view original

  Cool! BTW, why did you decide to make writing the signature mandatory? In tinydbus, for instance, I specifically made it so that BodyBuilder generates the signature automatically. In cases where it can't be determined automatically, you have to specify it manually (like addArrayBegin or addVariantBegin). Also, you mentioned you'd be doing benchmarks, could you add tinydbus to the list :)

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• xTrayambak (orginal) [2026-03-09T06:00:27+01:00] view original

  That's mostly because I'm lazy. :P

  And sure, I'll add tinydbus to the benchmarks too when I eventually get along to them.

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