Quest for eternal dock on Wayland - lambdock (C + GTK4 + Lisp GNU Guile Scheme)

A developer recounts building lambdock, a Wayland-native desktop dock written in C with GTK4 and gtk4-layer-shell, embedding a GNU Guile Scheme runtime via libguile for live configuration and a REPL. The story covers failed prototypes in pure Guile GTK bindings, Python, Rust, and Node.js before settling on a C core with an embedded Lisp brain. Features include multi-dock instance support with hot-reloading config files, a Scheme DSL for defining launchers and widgets, and a Unix domain socket REPL for live-editing dock state from Emacs Geiser or socat. The project is packaged for Guix, Nixpkgs, openSUSE, Debian, Arch, and as OCI containers, and works on wlr-layer-shell-compatible compositors like Sway, Hyprland, and KDE Plasma Wayland (not GNOME/Mutter).

Source: https://jointhefreeworld.org/blog/articles/gnu-linux/quest-for-eternal-dock/index.html. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.