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Lightning Talk Intermediate CC BY-SA 4.0 (talk, slides, notes). Referenced projects: Hyprland BSD-3-Clause; Lua and LuaJIT MIT. First Talk

Why ricing moved to Lua: Hyprland, Neovim and config that is code

Proposal status is Rejected
Session Description
  1. Me and my co-speaker Ayush just broke our old Hyprland configs to migrate everything from Hyprlang to this language called Lua. And it sparked a curiosity so we looked deeper into this decision, turns out almost everybody is going for this language right now!
  2. Everything's moving towards Lua, this talk describes the common patterns that span across popular projects like Hyprland and mass-adoption of this tiny language into rewrites like Neovim.  We present an analysis of where the open source ecosystem is moving with Lua and why it's being adopted en masse.
  3. We'll talk about the infamous Hyprlang-to-Lua migration, what advantages Lua provides over every other possible choice, what costs were involved (like one person considered paying 400$ to outsource it).
  4. We'll also look at the WHY this is not a great decision, factors like Turing-completeness, and decisions taken by maintainers of Niri, Sway and GNOME to stay on their existing config languages.
  5. Both our configs are public, you can read them before the talk, the last part is a practical checklist on implementations. More specfically, the costs at startup, how it handles safety and how painful is the migration really in general, and if it's even worth a shot.
Key Takeaways
  1. Why Hyprland moved to Lua, and why Neovim and WezTerm made the same call earlier
  2. What scripting a config enables: timers, events, callbacks, custom layouts
  3. What the migration cost users when no official converter shipped
  4. When a scripting config is the wrong choice: niri, Sway, and Hyprland's own other tools
  5. A practical checklist for judging config languages in your own project

References

https://hypr.land/news/26_lua/
https://wiki.hypr.land/Configuring/Start/
https://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-look-at-the-design-of-lua/
https://luajit.org/
https://github.com/langersword/dotfiles
https://github.com/Spirizeon/dotfiles

Session Categories

Technology architecture
Engineering practice - productivity, debugging
Talk License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (talk, slides, notes). Referenced projects: Hyprland BSD-3-Clause; Lua and LuaJIT MIT.

Speakers

Lakshaya Sharma
Lakshaya Sharma Member | NextTechLab AP

I break things to learn how to build them better. My first real task at NextTechLab was replicating Heartbleed, and I spent the months after that in CVEs, 0days and hackable environments.

These days I experiment with AI infrastructure, agent harnesses, evals. I open source most of what I ship. I like bringing people up together, and pushing holistic growth in communities. Otherwise F1, coffee, and starring repos at 3am.

https://linkedin.com/in/langersword
Ayush Dutta
Ayush Dutta Intern | Atlan

I ethically hacked into a startup for my first internship. I've found and replicated vulnerable environments and love to experiment with toolchains and softwares. I use and open source a LOT.

I'm great at community growth and talking to people. I also like reading self-help, doomscrolling X(twitter), playing badminton and brewing artisanal coffee.

https://linkedin.com/in/ayushduttasrmap

Reviews

Thanks for your submission. While we appreciate the focus on ricing Linux, that feels like a tad too focused on a specific section of the linux community. We would like to include talks with broader appeal, so we unfortunately cannot include this talk this time.

Reviewer #1 Rejected

good talk, but we already have a fair share of linux talks so it might be too much. Also hyprland has gone through a good amount of controversy in the wayland community, so i dont know if giving it space is a good idea.

Reviewer #2 Rejected