Wlroots Is A New, Modular Wayland Compositor Library

Drew DeVault who is the lead developer of the i3-compatible Sway Wayland compositor has introduced wlroots as a new modular Wayland compositor library.

The Sway compositor is currently built on its own "wlc" library that is an abstraction layer over DRM/libinput/GLESv2 and friends, but the new wlroots library is their planned replacement to offer a lower-level entry point.

Wlroots aims to make it easier to write Wayland compositors with greater code-use and interoperability between compositors by providing a base for building new compositors while also ensuring implemented compositors are interoperable via some new protocols around lock screens / on-screen keyboards / notification daemons and more.

Besides Sway working on wlroots, the Way-Cooler and Waymonad compositors have also been working on this new low-level Wayland compositor library.

Those wishing to learn more about the Wlroots project can check out its GitHub repository and the just-published wlroots whitepaper written by Drew DeVault.