// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Quest for the Eternal Dock – Lambdock
This is the story of lambdock: https://codeberg.org/jjba23/lambdock
lambdock is a modern, hyper-hackable, Wayland-native desktop dock application (C and Guile Scheme + GTK4) w/ REPL.
As a heavy computer user, spending most of my day enjoying digital life, and as an eye-candy enjoyer and workflow optimization afficionado, I have long dreamt of the ultimate desktop dock.
Here’s the story behind lambdock , the Wayland-native beast with infinite hackability, fluid physics animcations, instant responsiveness, and free as in freedom .
But to get here, I will first take you through the mindset, the graveyard of failed prototypes, the uphill battles and the ultimate conquest of GTK4 C runtime, and embedding of a living, breathing, interactive Lisp heart.
For years, desktop GNU/Linux users moving to Wayland faced a recurring tragedy: the loss of iconic, deeply hackable docks like Cairo-Dock and Plank. That being said, anno 2026, those (and other) projects have made great efforts to become Wayland-compatible, so that’s great. While bar engines like Waybar and EWW excel at status displays, a true application dock that can rival those heavyweights (and macOS too) requires a unique blend of layout positioning, dynamic window tracking, auto-hiding, and fluid hover physics for animations.
lambdock’s is a story of resilience in many ways, as I cannot even remember how many attempts I made at building a dock (in different ways). Little did I know how many paradigms, ideas and PoCs would collapse before my vision became tangible reality.
On the 30th of July 2026, I had a revelation and set out to build lambdock: a Wayland-native desktop dock that wouldn’t just replicate the macOS or Cairo-Dock experience, but would transcend it with full runtime inspectability, hackability, and Lisp enlightenment.
I find GTK to be the very best UI toolkit for GNU/Linux and other platforms, anno 2026. So for me that choice was pretty clear, even if I also toyed with Qt and others, but GTK always came on top. After the wreckage of many PoCs and while reading some HackerNews in bed, a thought crossed my mind, and suddenly, absolute clarity!
Why not use idiomatic modern GTK4, in the language that it’s written in. Oh wait, that language, C, has libguile.h, a great library inter-operability with Lisp (GNU Guile Scheme), allowing bi-directional bindings and communication. Why not go down this rabbit hole, which might at the same time teach me more about my favourite language (GNU Guile) and allow me a frictionless setup with GTK and native super performance.