Drew DeVault explains why the sway Wayland compositor team replaced the wlc library with wlroots. wlc was designed as a monolithic Wayland compositor with a plugin API, giving developers little control over rendering or window management. Over time, sway's bugs increasingly reflected wlc's architectural limitations. After discussions with other Wayland compositor projects facing the same issues, the team decided to build wlroots — a modular toolkit that lets developers compose their own Wayland compositor rather than working around a fixed one. Despite the risk of a ground-up rewrite, wlroots has succeeded and now powers six different Wayland compositors targeting desktops, tablets, and phones, enabling innovation that wlc and even X11 could not support.
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