Re: 3.2: gjs/seed

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:
>
> == Dynamic Languages in GNOME ==
>
> One thing that's worth addressing though (again) is the question "do
> we need both Python and JavaScript?".  The uptake of both seed and gjs
> has been relatively low; lower than Python at least for scripting
> GNOME apps.  However, I think at least one the core reason for working
> on JavaScript remains that *we define the platform*.

Actually I've been thinking about this more, and I am changing my
mind; if we don't have an immediate plan for making JavaScript more
compelling, and there's still active people maintaining Python, we
should be advertising the latter, and not the former.

So here's what I propose (and I'm willing to write patches, but mostly
this is just marketing/messaging):

* Officially mark both gjs and seed as experimental (this is the
reality as it is for 3.0 anyways)
* Drop all consumers of seed in GNOME 3.2; rewrite them (this is just
gnome-games/lightsoff?) using C/Vala/gtkmm/Python
* Remove /usr/bin/gjs
* Keep gnome-shell on gjs (but switch to using Spidermonkey 1.8.5, and
no - porting to Python would be a pointless waste of time at best)

What does this mean about the JavaScript future?  My take here is that
for 3.2 at least, we could move it more towards being an "embedding"
language, designed from the very start to be used in a split C/JS
role.  Also, this allows us flexibility to evolve JavaScript and
return later with something more interesting.  For example, a combined
WebKit-with-arbitrary-gnome-JavaScript that I've seen at least two
different attempts at.

Thoughts?