With great pleasure may I announce that our move off of wlroots is now complete and MR 6608 is now merged.

After over 1000 comments on 6608 alone, and over 3 months of the entire process, the rewrite is done.

With it, Hyprland is no longer a wlroots-based Wayland compositor, and instead, a fully independent implementation of the protocol.

Don’t worry though, all your wlroots apps will still work.

Timeline

As I’ve outlined in my blogpost on blog.vaxry.net in May, the rewrite took place in two parts.

The first part was rewriting all protocol implementations. This has been finished on June 8th, with MR 6268 being merged.

The second part was rewriting the backend implementation, i.e. the low-level backend stuff (KMS/DRM/libinput et al) which is now done with 6608.

Changes under the hood

All protocol implementations are now integrated into Hyprland itself, and written with C++. This should reduce the amount of memory issues and bugs compared to wlroots implementations and has already been doing that.

The backend rendering stuff has been migrated into a library written from scratch called aquamarine.

Aquamarine is not a competitor to wlroots - wlroots is a library for building Wayland compositors, while aquamarine is a tiny library providing an abstraction on top of the very low-level backend stuff, that also allows your program to run on either a Wayland compositor (in a window) or on a DRM session (tty).

Additionally, many new interfaces have been added to hyprutils, and hyprwayland-scanner has gotten the ability to generate client code, already used by aquamarine and hyprpaper.

Changes for the user

See the wiki MR for the changes to config options, environment variables, etc.

Apart from a few minor changes to how things are called, nothing else should change for you, the user.

When will I get it?

The changes are staged for 0.42.0. If you want to test them right away, check out the -git branch, as usual.

Special thanks

Massive thanks to all the people who helped in the long process (what was it, like 3 months?) of rewriting the wlroots stack to a nicer language.

Special thanks to:

• Agent00Ming (testing and patience)
• Ikalco (tons of patches)
• gulafaran (patches and testing)
• phonetic112 (testing)
• UjinT34 (testing and patches)
• fufexan (nix and meson)
• And everyone who helped test here and there! There’s been 38 participants in the aquamarine MR alone!

Cheers and ad meliora, vaxry.