GNOME Might Need To Crack Down On Their JavaScript Extensions

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I know many will point the finger at javascript, but thats not the problem. In fact, Gnome would be better off if they rewrote the whole darn thing in Javascript and got rid of all of that nasty C/C++ code. The key here is fix the bug which probably actually have their roots in the C++ code. I also find the idea of "add-ons" from third parties something questionable to encourage. If someone is writing a popular add-on thats a sign the feature needs to be included as well vetted code in the mainline code tree.

As far as the crashing issue. this is due to the STUPIDITY of the wayland design that many of us have warned about where we took all of the good ideas and architecture of X and threw it all away and make every mistake that X intentionally avoided, which was to seperate the X server from the window manager, so if the window manager went bad, it wouldnt take the whole thing down, in fact its possible on X for applications to survive a window manager crash. Now with this Wayland shit, if the window manager crashes, it takes down not only all of the apps, but the display as well, perhaps even the entire OS. This is what happens when you decide its a good idea to wrap the window manager, display server, the hardware drivers, all up into one big nasty bloated piece of crap.

[ssokolow]

From my perspective extensions are the opposite of what one expects from a UNIX like platform. If people need additional functionality write an app!!!!!!

By design, Wayland prevents apps from mucking with how window management behaves as a security feature. You have to write an extension to the compositor to change that sort of thing.

So yeah I have to agree if the GNOME team wants to impress me, start using languages like C++/Rust or Swift. Build your software so that it has a long future and is maintainable and understandable by many. By the way I know that Rust and Swift are not really ready for prime time. In an ideal world both would be standardized much in the way C or C++ have been.

As much as I love Rust, there's still a justifiable reason the GNOME crew are using C: It's the only thing with a truly stable ABI. If you use anything else, you have to maintain both your nice comfortable native API and a C one for other languages to bind to.

As for swift, last I checked, it was still crippled if it didn't have the MacOS/iOS frameworks to act as part of the standard library.

That said, they are working on supplanting C where feasible. These are the people who invented the Vala language (a compile-to-C-and-GLib language) and, now that Rust exists, they're working to bring Rust support for the GObject ecosystem to the point where Rust is a first-class citizen.

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As a whole I really wish that open source developers would move away from the world of C and onto a modern language. My feelings about C++ are mixed, it has been greatly improved in recent times but it has plenty of dark areas. Apples Swift is really grabbing my attention and frankly I'd like to see it explored more fully to implement open source software in the future. I like that Swift in many ways has the feel of an interpreted language, yet delivers the speed of many compiled languages.

So yeah I have to agree if the GNOME team wants to impress me, start using languages like C++/Rust or Swift. Build your software so that it has a long future and is maintainable and understandable by many. By the way I know that Rust and Swift are not really ready for prime time. In an ideal world both would be standardized much in the way C or C++ have been.

It is my understanding that the people on the QT side of the world are hard at work adapting some of their older code to the latest C++ standards. If that goes well they could move that tool kit way ahead of GNOME. Note I've never been a KDE /QT fan, preferring the simpler environments. That could change though if they can deliver superior products that are reliable and maybe a little less gaudy.

C/C++ are really bad languages for application developments. No app code should ever be written in them. Ever. Horrible, horrible languages for application development. Javascript is far superior by comparison, so its very frustrating her to have people blame javascript and then suggest compiled languages like C/C++, with all of their hanging pointers and buffer overflows. if your going to have bugs in software, your going to have bugs, but using C/C++ is going to make your bugs much more awful.

Wayland was a big mistake. Display server and window manager in one big bloated thing, let every window manager implement its own flawed versions of the protocol that applications have to use (even for the basic stuff) ? No thanks.

[cybertraveler]

As a whole I really wish that open source developers would move away from the world of C and onto a modern language. My feelings about C++ are mixed, it has been greatly improved in recent times but it has plenty of dark areas. Apples Swift is really grabbing my attention and frankly I'd like to see it explored more fully to implement open source software in the future. I like that Swift in many ways has the feel of an interpreted language, yet delivers the speed of many compiled languages.

So yeah I have to agree if the GNOME team wants to impress me, start using languages like C++/Rust or Swift. Build your software so that it has a long future and is maintainable and understandable by many. By the way I know that Rust and Swift are not really ready for prime time. In an ideal world both would be standardized much in the way C or C++ have been.

Also, remember Golang! Compiled, fast, typed and modern. Also it's very popular. However, it is garbage collected.

[cybertraveler]

Wayland was a big mistake. Display server and window manager in one big bloated thing, let every window manager implement its own flawed versions of the protocol that applications have to use (even for the basic stuff) ? No thanks.

You don't have to make it as one big bloated thing. You can have most of the window management functions in completely separate process to the compositor. You could also have a separate process for the desktop panels / widges.

Also: you don't have to make your own display server implementation:
1) there are already shared components of a wayland desktop being used by multiple Wayland Servers (eg libwayland and the widely used libinput)
2) as the various display servers mature it seems very probable to me that desktops will borrow Wayland compositors from external projects to build upon. Just like how Gnome 3 borrowed the Firefox Javascript JIT interpreted as opposed to writing their own.

[Luke]

[*]Writing an alternative to migrating all of my comments into Disqus. (I put a high value on supporting in-page comments, even if I only get them infrequently.)[/LIST]

That is a valid reason not to switch from wordpress if you want comments or want people to see them! Some of us block Disqus unconditionally simply because it is so commonly used as to turn it into a potential cross-site tracker. I have literally never seena Disqus comment as I have never once unblocked them.

[cybertraveler]

I have literally never seena Disqus comment as I have never once unblocked them.

Same.

[Weasel]

lol at all these "modern language" fanboys. You also forgot D.

Why don't you guys bash Vulkan too? Stick with OpenGL eh? Vulkan too low level, too hard for some people's mental capacity, just like with C it's too hard to reason with pointers properly and clean after their own. Oh, I get it, it's because Vulkan is "newer" than OpenGL, while C is not a "new" language. I get it, if C was new it would be the best language ever eh?

Honestly, even ignoring any and all technical stuff about C/C++ vs other inferior languages, you simply look at for example some Rust code and see these words and know to get the fuck out of there:

let mut

[ssokolow]

Honestly, even ignoring any and all technical stuff about C/C++ vs other inferior languages, you simply look at for example some Rust code and see these words and know to get the fuck out of there:

let mut

I'm probably going to regret asking, but what's so bad about let mut?

[ssokolow]

That is a valid reason not to switch from wordpress if you want comments or want people to see them! Some of us block Disqus unconditionally simply because it is so commonly used as to turn it into a potential cross-site tracker. I have literally never seena Disqus comment as I have never once unblocked them.

*nod* I only unblock Disqus temporarily on specific posts and have uMatrix's cookie-blocking and a user-agent randomizer to help out. My plan is to write something that is essentially a self-hostable Disqus clone similar to how Piwik is a self-hostable alternative to Google Analytics... Ideally with support for...

1. Baking comments which pass moderation into the static HTML each time the site gets regenerated so that they wind in Git alongside the post for SEO, archival, and page-load performance. (Possibly baked in anonymously, with post IDs used to look up the nicknames and such on JavaScript load so GDPR compliance doesn't require rewriting git history.)
2. Support for a degraded but functional experience with JavaScript disabled using an iframe to display comments not yet baked in and Reply links which load a whole new page.
3. A combination of novel approaches to anti-spam that have worked beautifully on other sites of mine. (eg. Refusing to accept comments containing the strings </a>, [/url], or [/link] with a 200 OK response and a human-readable "Please switch to a bare URL and resubmit" message has dropped the spam on http://gbindex.ssokolow.com/contact down to one spam message per year... which only gets through that check because the spambot is so broken that the post contains nothing but a nonsense word like "srpgvsre" and, thus, doesn't serve a spammer's goals. I'll probably block those by adding something like a 10-character minimum post length and/or by adding a URL field like WordPress has, but hidden by CSS and used as a honeypot. My WordPress spam bin has some very funny examples, such as one spambot which likes to send me the raw source to the template it's supposed to be using to generate spam.)