Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 13:22 -0500, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> JS, whilst a good glue language, is nevertheless problematic in this it
> appears impotent (no native dbus support nor subclassing).

have you eve had a look at the current JS-based technologies in GNOME?
Seed supports sub-classing, and both GJS and Seed have native support
for writing client-side D-Bus applications.

>  I would only
> recommend it for scripting that does not need dbus. Currently a lot of
> code needs to be written in C to make up for these shortfalls in
> Gnome-Shell

only base classes need to be in C.

>  so I dont think its a particular good choice. I dont however
> see it as a blocker to gnome-shell acceptance

how magnanimous of you.

> A much better alternative to any VM out there

no, not really - unless you *really* want to microbenchmark every single
VM.

plus, JavaScript can be JITted - something that hasn't been enabled yet
for the current users of JS on the GNOME desktop (the Shell and Games)
because the performance inherent to the language are good enough not to
require a JIT.

>  is Vala which sports two
> languages (Genie being a python/Delphi as well as Vala's c#/java syntax)
> and which gives C like performance and is moulded to fit gobject and our
> platform perfectly with better Dbus integration

is Genie even used outside the simple applications I see on the Vala
mailing list and IRC channel?

inventing a language is all fine and dandy, and Vala is a very good
project I follow with enthusiasm; but since its main syntax (let alone
Genie's one) hasn't been finalized yet then I don't get any of the
advantages you're purporting it would bring.

+++

all in all, this whole digression on the scripting language smells an
awful lot of bikeshedding to me. if the Shell had been written in Python
we would have had the same arguments on d-d-l - emails of pure vapor and
a Shell that trawled the disk loading hundreds of unused modules on
startup, taking 60 seconds just to load.

the Shell has *already* been written in JS. unless you (and by "you" I
mean anyone, not specifically you Jamie) are willing to port it all to
Python or C# or Genie or COBOL (to which I suggest to JFDI) discussing
the language of choice is pure bikeshedding.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.