Re: New Module Proposal. libseed

[Xan Lopez <xan gnome org>]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> Spidermonkey: Mature, good API for extensibility. Nice language
>   extensions. (JS 1.7.) Mostly packaged as part of xulrunner, which is
>   a problem. Maintained by an organization that has a thorough
>   commitment to open source. (That doesn't mean that we have more
>   influence over the direction, necessarily, but is worth noting.)
>

(...)

>
> P.S. - Is compatibility with Javascript standards a concern? No.
>  Not at all. Javascript standardization is highly politicized and
>  affected by concerns like what Microsoft can implement in IE and
>  in general by considerations of cross-browser compatibility. We
>  should use whatever dialect of Javascript is supported by our engine
>  that makes our life better.

So, Robert and myself just had a discussion with the JSC people. They
are apparently very reluctant to add non-standard extensions to their
JS implementation, and I think a few good points were raised during
the discussion:

- They claim not all the extensions are well thought out, and that
some of them make the language more complex and harder to implement in
an efficient and high-performing way (the specific example for this
was 'let'). I have no opinion on this matter, but I think it's worth
to know what they think.
- Using non-standard extensions makes your life harder if the moment
ever comes when you'd like to switch to another JS engine (which is
what is happening right now, fwiw).
- Using non-standard extensions makes it harder to transfer code from
the Web to GNOME (and viceversa), which is IHMO one of the biggest
points in favor of using JS.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to just stick to a JS defined in
some standard widely used for all GNOME code, in order to avoid future
headaches, and consider other languages with real self-extension
capabilities if we are really serious about "using whatever dialects
make our life easier" (<mandatory plug for the Lisp family of
languages>).

Cheers, Xan