this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
104 points (93.3% liked)
Linux
48178 readers
816 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
GNOME is primarily written in C
the desktop shell is mostly javascript though
Closer to 50/50, and other parts of the GNOME desktop like mutter, are largely C. Saying the entire GNOME desktop is mostly JS is silly.
No one here said GNOME desktop is mostly JS.
You're right, they said the desktop shell, which is still incorrect, but I guess a little less incorrect. My bad.
Well, I started this thread saying it runs on JavaScript, and I mean that they need JS for most of the interactions with the desktop, like gesture or mouse events. 😞 Even if most of the code is C, we all know we need to write much many lines of code of C to do the same with JS, so most of the logics on GNOME is computed by JS. We need some rust here. 🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀
On the other hand, saying that there's way too much javascript in it is objectively factual.
You don't get to decide what too much JS in the project is unless you actually work on and have in depth knowledge of the project. I dont like JS, but it has its uses.
Many people are conflating modern electron bloatware with 'JS bad', but things are not that simple.
Yeah, on their git says 46% of the code is JavaScript: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell
That's pretty much, almost half of the code.
That page also shows that there is more C. That page is also specifically the shell, not all of the desktop.
There is less than 4% more code in C than JavaScript. That's pretty much, many features on the gnome-desktop is using JavaScript too, like gestures and mouse events.
Okay, but still needs JavaScript, they are slowly trying to remove or improve it. But it is a fact that it also runs on JavaScript. 🤣
Using JavaScript isn't inherently a bad thing. JavaScript can be very useful when used for scripting. Obviously anything with a new for performance will be done in C.
JavaScript isn't the best language to make a desktop interface in my opinion, it can be very efficient, but you can see in bugs (at least in the past) how bad performance it had, and they needed to re-factor it to replace to C or improve the JavaScript. I'm just laughing and making fun of it using JavaScript, not saying it is slow, Gnome is pretty fast nowadays.
Javascript was a toy created in the mid 90s to make dumb interactive animations and have some sort of dynamic aspect to a web page. The world starting to code entire desktop programs and servers in it was a giant, horrific, societal mistake.