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lambdock ships a Wayland dock with C/GTK4 core and embedded Guile Scheme REPL
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Illustration only Photo by Juan Pablo on Unsplash
A developer released lambdock, a Wayland-native desktop dock built with a small C/GTK4 core and an embedded GNU Guile Scheme engine that provides runtime hackability via a socket REPL.
This architecture gives dock users Emacs-style live extensibility at runtime without recompilation, a capability previous Wayland docks lack. The C/Scheme split also avoids the performance problems that killed Python and Rust prototypes, making it a viable pattern for other latency-sensitive Wayland shell components.
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lambdock uses a small C core for rendering and low-level details with an embedded GNU Guile Scheme engine for higher logic, inspired by Emacs.
Previous prototypes in pure Guile GI, Python, and Rust all failed due to binding friction, GIL bottlenecks, and borrow-checker conflicts with GTK4 respectively.
The dock exposes an interactive socket REPL, Lisp metaprogramming macros, dynamic multi-dock spawning, native Wayland foreign-toplevel window tracking, and frame-clock-driven hover animations.
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