Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Well, my laptop has fast enough CPUs (pretty much any x86 CPU made in the last 5 odd years is "fast"). Unfortunately, it doesn't have that much memory (1.5GB). This was sufficient prior to GNOME shell, except that I couldn't keep as many browser tabs open as on my desktop, and it was better to minimise swapping between LibreOffice and my browser, when using the former. GNOME shell's memory usage, its tendency to expand quite quickly, has put an additional pressure on memory, such that it's regularly much slower than before, as it's using swap much more heavily than before.

If bugs relating to leaks have been fixed, and things are due to improve in future releases, that's great.

I didn't place any blame on Javascript. ;) Though, for whatever it's worth, my experience is that it can be even harder to avoid or fix leaks in GCed languages than in ones with explicit semantics for managing ownership of memory.