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GNOME debates Javascript bindingsGNOME debates Javascript bindingsPosted May 21, 2009 10:51 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: GNOME debates Javascript bindings by elanthis Parent article: GNOME debates Javascript bindings
I like Javascript too, though I rarely use it in anger these days.
I don't think (I am not involved in the larger debate, I just read the article) anyone is proposing to use Javascript to _write_ large applications. Adding a few hundred lines of JS here and a few hundred there as glue is quite different from implementing say Evolution or some other large app in JS.
Javascript is well suited as glue, and I don't think any amount of work on it will make it into an excellent application development language. If that's what GNOME is really proposing, well, it won't be the first time they (or KDE) have had a crazy idea I didn't agree with. Lua would also be a good candidate for writing glue, but I don't think it's much better than JS. Javascript has a major benefit of being very widely understood, this has the effect that even if it's technically not the ideal choice it may be a pragmatic choice because you don't have the option of waiting for a crop of expert Lua programmers to volunteer to work on GNOME.
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GNOME debates Javascript bindings Posted May 21, 2009 15:31 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link] I don't think (I am not involved in the larger debate, I just read the article) anyone is proposing to use Javascript to _write_ large applications. <cough> Firefox <cough> (or large chunks of it, anyway)
GNOME debates Javascript bindings Posted May 21, 2009 18:47 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Come on gerv, I've hacked on Mozilla. Am I going to find that Mozilla's AES implementation is now in Javascript? No. The image renderer? No. There are all these big complex systems in C++, and then there's glue holding the thing together, and that glue's where Javascript is (mostly) found.
I recall (I am an old codger) fairly well the work to implement PAC in Mozilla, and basically 95% of the heavy lifting was C++ hacking, and then it needed some glue to connect it up and handle prefs and so on, and that was in Javascript.
And to get to the point where Javascript plays this role, Mozilla had to create XPCOM. So Javascript without XPCOM would be even less suited to writing a whole application.
GNOME debates Javascript bindings Posted May 21, 2009 20:27 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
More and more parts are being rewritten in JavaScript, for all the obvious reasons (high-level language, no buffer issues etc.) I don't have the time to run a full code line counter, but:
gerv@otter:mozilla$ find . -name "*.cpp" -exec cat {} \; | wc -l
Seems to be about 65:35 at the moment. Hardly just "the glue".
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