Re: New Module Proposal. libseed

[Havoc Pennington <havoc pennington gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:51 AM, Xan Lopez <xan gnome org> wrote:
> - 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>).

The problem is that JS-with-a-few-basic-enhancements is just _so_ much
better than least-common-denominator-web-JS. There's no need to go
down a slippery slope of a million enhancements, just to fix some
basic stuff... like variable scoping. Web JS is why people think "ugh,
JavaScript"

You can always suck web JS into GNOME, but the vice-versa was hosed as
soon as we added a module system for example. Not to mention
gobject-introspection APIs.

Havoc