Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:23 AM, Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org> wrote:

> I have not been following the GNOME shell discussions, but I wonder
> why we JavaScript is needed at all. Now that some of the core modules
> exhibit Python, suddently JavaScript is discussed. I have always
> considered programming and script languages as interchangeable
> (besides syntactic and refactoring sugar), so we need a good argument
> for adding new ones that just make the dependency stack larger and
> larger. I'd really strongly opt for "C + Mono + one scripting
> language" or "C + Mono" or "C + one scripting language" when we talk
> about the core desktop. I see no advantage whatsoever in a Babylonian
> approach -- unless you convince me with good arguments.

This is a large topic, but basically I think we should be conservative
for the "core desktop", and liberal for apps.  My definition of "core
desktop" is "what you need to launch applications and select windows",
not "desktop module set" which includes all kinds of applications,
applets, etc.

The specific argument for JavaScript for the core desktop is twofold:

1) It's not a platform in itself, it is supposed to be embedded in a
host platform.  In our case, the GNOME/GObject libraries are the host
platform.  No conflicts in fundamental things like threading,
mainloop, http libraries etc.
2) It's used on the web, which is by far the biggest crossplatform
application system for desktop computing.  We get the benefit of all
of the innovation going into JS from browser vendors.

On the other hand, I do think we need to be liberal for applications,
and that's the goal of GObject Introspection; make the platform
by-default more scriptable for all of the other runtimes/platforms out
there.

>
> Now that both the Epiphany web browser and Yelp [1] moved away  from
> Gecko to WebKit, it seems to be very odd that we suddently introduce a
> XULrunner dependency again. Is this a political decision due to the
> collaboration of the GNOME foundation and the Mozilla foundation that
> was once announced?

<snuffs out his cigar and waves away a bit of the smoke from the backroom>

There is no conspiracy...


More seriously...yes, it's a problem.  Roughly what I'd like to say
here is that we encourage convergence on ECMAScript 5 at a code level;
maybe the JS engine then becomes pluggable through something like
alex's GScript prototype.