On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Owen Taylor <otay...@redhat.com> wrote: > Spidermonkey: Mature, good API for extensibility. Nice language > extensions. (JS 1.7.) Mostly packaged as part of xulrunner, which is > a problem. Maintained by an organization that has a thorough > commitment to open source. (That doesn't mean that we have more > influence over the direction, necessarily, but is worth noting.) >
(...) > > P.S. - Is compatibility with Javascript standards a concern? No. > Not at all. Javascript standardization is highly politicized and > affected by concerns like what Microsoft can implement in IE and > in general by considerations of cross-browser compatibility. We > should use whatever dialect of Javascript is supported by our engine > that makes our life better. So, Robert and myself just had a discussion with the JSC people. They are apparently very reluctant to add non-standard extensions to their JS implementation, and I think a few good points were raised during the discussion: - They claim not all the extensions are well thought out, and that some of them make the language more complex and harder to implement in an efficient and high-performing way (the specific example for this was 'let'). I have no opinion on this matter, but I think it's worth to know what they think. - Using non-standard extensions makes your life harder if the moment ever comes when you'd like to switch to another JS engine (which is what is happening right now, fwiw). - Using non-standard extensions makes it harder to transfer code from the Web to GNOME (and viceversa), which is IHMO one of the biggest points in favor of using JS. So perhaps it would be a good idea to just stick to a JS defined in some standard widely used for all GNOME code, in order to avoid future headaches, and consider other languages with real self-extension capabilities if we are really serious about "using whatever dialects make our life easier" (<mandatory plug for the Lisp family of languages>). Cheers, Xan _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list