On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Jeffery Olson <[email protected]>wrote:
> Wow. there is a lot of crazy in this thread. I'm sorry. > > <rant> > > >>>> Me personally, I'm not in favor of writing writing it > >>>> in Javascript because of the dynamic typing (will be painfull to find > >>>> problems caused by changed Mutter bindings). > > The risk that you're describing, there's a set of tools you can > develop to hedge against this very eventuality. They're called unit > tests. This is probably a textbook example for why unit tests are > important, especially in a dynamic language environment. > Of course unit tests are important. But, it's annoying, and certainly less that optimal, to have to write unit tests to check for errors that a type system handles naturally. And, then you *still* end up having to a ton of runtime checking of types in your code, which can easily turn into a mess. > > Now the Bad News: there's no existing unit test infrastructure in > gnome-shell javascript land. We need it, badly. And the Good News: > there's lots of great frameworks out there for this for both the > browser (qunit, screw-unit, jspec, etc) and server-side (vows, jspec > again, etc) environments that we, as a community, can leverage to this > end. This is something that's been on my mind quite a bit, lately. > Java has some of the best unit testing infrastructure around. > > Also: have you even given javascript a chance? Please don't let it's > history in the browser bias you against it; it's a marvelous language > with a lot of really interesting features that makes nice, expressive > code possible. I think the gnome-shell team made a *great* choice when > they chose javascript for the scripting environment and scriptmonkey > is a good engine with a great performance for our needs (with a clean, > C-based API.. putting aside the hype around v8, for now). The work the > team has done around the introspection-based bindings is excellent. > > The gnome-shell team, like myself, know that there's a ways to go yet, > in terms of making the javascript extensibility environment more > robust and exposing more features of the underlying C code. Sadly, > they have other dragons to slay right now and heading into 3.2. It's a > good thing that this is an FOSS project and anyone can submit > features/patches (I've done my share to expose a few methods in > mutter, but there's much to be done still). I've found the team to be > very constructive and receptive to patches, thus far. > > > I've been wondering about the possibility of the leveraging the GWT > compiler > > to write gnome-shell extensions (any js code, really) in Java. > > I hope you're joking, because I don't even know where to begin with > this. Java is definitely a step backwards, here. > Uh... at the risk of causing more ranting, would you care to elaborate here? Note that I'm not at all proposing some kind of mandate or official blessing at all. I was simply mentioning the possibility of writing extension code (thanks to the fact that the impl language is javascript), in a language with strong type safety, tons of tooling, perhaps more developers world-wide than any other, and a large, awesome open-source community. Also, I don't think you should assume that people don't know javascript just because they would prefer using a type-safe language... <snip/> Jesse
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