Re: New Module Proposal: libseed

[Johan Dahlin <johan gnome org>]

[Robert and list moderators: I sent a copy from another mail address,
 please ignore that mail and reply to this]

Robert Carr wrote:
> I was not planning to do this until .28, however a nice Clutter game
> written in Seed was merged in to gnome-games today, and there is some
> interest in being able to include this in .26.
>
> I would like to propose Seed (http://live.gnome.org/Seed) as a beta -bindings module for .26 
> For those not following, Seed is a set of bindings between WebKit's
> JavaScriptCore interpreter, and GObject (through GObject introspection).
> Seed provides a standalone interpreter, and a library with a clean API
> for embedding Seed as a scripting language. Through GOBject-introspection 
> Seed automatically provides bindings to dozens of libraries, in a
> convenient fashion where individual bindings do not have to be maintained 
> (but just the core library). Seed provides no "platform" of it's own
> (unlike say Python) and builds instead on the large GNOME platform, in a
> similar fashion to Vala. In short, Seed provides a way to write GNOME
> applications in JavaScript, and to easily embed JavaScript as an
> extension language in your application (similar to Guile, but perhaps
> more accessible, as JavaScript is often cited as the language with the
> most programmers).

As a maintainer of gobject-introspection I'm strongly objecting inclusion
of modules in GNOME using it at this point.

gobject-introspection is currently not promising neither ABI or API
stability, the best would be for application authors to wait until it's
included in the platform, at which point it can be used in GNOME itself.
It's just not ready to be included yet in my opinion.

The Vala comparision is bogus as the generated .c code can be committed to
svn and thus avoids any external dependencies. Depending on a library
linking directly to libgirepository is a whole different matter.

Johan