Re: New Module Proposal. libseed

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> 2009/5/13 Jason D. Clinton <me jasonclinton com>:
>> I think we must have both engines. The JS optimization battle between
>> Mozilla and Apple is just now heating up; we cannot wait until the
>> battle is over to pick a winner and start working with JavaScript.
>
> That sounds to me more of a counter argument, is the GNOME official
> desktop release the right place for a JavaScript engine battle? Isn't
> the performance of both already good enough for our purposes? It seems
> to me that they both already perform better than Python and we've been
> supporting it for ages already.

As has already been stated elsewhere, (with exception to the 'let'
statement) they should be runtime compatible. The "battle" will happen
regardless of what GNOME does.


> It also seems to me that JSC/Seed is being adopted in much more
> modules than GJS (please, correct me here if I'm wrong), plus there
> are quite a few modules going for WebKit. I think that having one, and
> only one choice for things like this (platform), are quite helpful in
> order to have a more consistent platform.

In this case, it would help in the sense of having more "eyes"
focusing on one JS implementation--I agree. OTOH, if we are willing to
forgo that benefit in favour of hedging our bets in the battle for the
fastest, most featureful JS virtual machine, we gain a heterogeneous
JS platform that's robust enough to withstand the growing pains.


> Note taht Javascript can be a potential entry vector for the GNOME
> platform (which is one of the most interesting points of getting a JS
> engine in), I think people will have a hard time to make a decision
> they might not fully understand (the engince choice), and
> documentation will get messier. Not to mention that we will end up
> with one extra dependency.

Hopefully everyone can agree on some solution WRT to "let" and then we
don't have to care which one they develop with: their work will run on
both.