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The open-source reference implementation of Wayland protocol is split in two C libraries, libwayland-client and libwayland-server. Their main responsibility is to handle the Inter-process communication (IPC) with each other, therefore guaranteeing the protocol objects marshaling and messages synchronization. The server library is designed to work much like libwayland-client, although it is considerably complicated due to the server needing to support multiple versions of the protocol. It is best to learn libwayland-client first. Each open socket to a client is represented by a wl_client. The equivalent of the wl_proxy that libwayland-client uses to represent an object is wl_resource for client-created objects, and wl_global for objects created by the server. Often a server is also a client for another Wayland server, and thus must link with both libwayland-client and libwayland-server. This produces some type name conflicts (such as the client wl_display and server wl_display, but the duplicate-but-not-the-same types are opaque, and accessed only inside the correct library where it came from. Naturally that means that the program writer needs to always know if a pointer to a wl_display is for the server or client side and use the corresponding functions.

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