Fun fact, roughly half of gnome-shell codebase is written in JavaScript.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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I know that extensions are mostly written in js, but why codebase? Any legacy reason I wonder?
From what I can gather
- JS is system agnostic, doesn't require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.
- JS is widely understood, could get more contributors.
- JS is a good enough scripting language made with UI stuff in mind.
I also see people lamenting that lua wasn't chosen, so there's that.
İf it works good enough for my laptop phone and pc then it's good enough for everyone else
Besides, it wouldn't have made much of a massive difference if it was lua or js, but even lua has it's issues leading to people preferring other versions of lua
JS is system agnostic, doesn’t require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.
Can you expand on that? How does JS have less requirements than Python?
While it's true that both python and js are interpreted languages, making them highly portable, JS at that time was a very lightweight language with a robust runtime offered by mozjs, that was built to be easy to embed into other systems, while python was designed for being the framework in which you build apps directly, hence requiring deeper dependencies.
Sources:
https://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/#comment-1691
https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2008/09/09/embeddable-languages-an-implementation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/120edc0/comment/jdgwyoq/
Is that bad?
It's fun
And that's a fact
A rock fact
Oh that's why cinnamon (fork of Gnome 3) uses a ton of JavaScript.
Great for my 128Gb RAM laptop