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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I think what was more interesting to me was GnomeJS itself! I had no idea this was a thing, and it appears that they have built a few official things in Gnome using it (weather app, sound recorder app).

Very interesting!

Edit: looks like most/all (?) of gnome's shell is JavaScript too! https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/tree/main/js/ui... seems like NPM is nowhere to be seen too - brilliant.

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There are pros and cons to using JS. GJS has only collected the negative features of JS. If there is some guarantee for JS applications that it will work in a few years, then each new GNOME release breaks half of the extensions. Enabling and disabling an extension freezes the system for 8-10 seconds.

And it would be fine if GNOME extensions were too functional... But in fact, the functionality of GNOME extensions lags behind conky or XFCE in capabilities by at least 10 years.

Yeah, JavaScript has been at the core of Gnome now for years. It's brilliant IMHO because it enables the huge ecosystem of web devs to build native apps. The only thing is it's very poorly known/advertised for some reason.

It works quite well too and is very easy to get started. I've hacked together some gjs snippets a few times and it was so, so much easier for a drive-by hack than in the past trying to deal with a complex build system.

You can also use html5 as a display output for gtk applications.

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/broadway.html

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