5 ms·

It's going to be very interesting to see if Atom decides to fully make the move to JavaScript / ES6+

pier25 9y ago
CS is one of the main reasons I haven't contributed more to Atom. I guess when Atom was started it made sense to use CS, not anymore. Hopefully Github will switch to ES6/7 or TS.
- gabrielcsapo 9y ago
  also this
- uranian 9y ago
  Instead of wanting projects to move to a language you know, you can better first learn the language they are written in, and try to understand their decision in the first place. If you know CS very well you would not be so eager to move to Babel transpiler imao. There is also a nice comment in here about a large project that became a misery because of TS. Think twice before you hope!
alangpierce 9y ago
They're already using JavaScript for all new code, and gradually converting their existing code over using decaffeinate (e.g. https://github.com/atom/atom/commit/30cd83f7aa03c023e6103b648906107796472fe8 https://github.com/atom/atom/commit/30cd83f7aa03c023e6103b64... ). But it's a reasonably big codebase and I imagine moving everything over incrementally will take a while.
- baby 9y ago
  What about moving to web assembly? Would it be relevant? Or is this a Firefox feature only? Or is this not interesting because the point is to write it in javascript?
  - alangpierce 9y ago
    WebAssembly will be supported by all browsers and JS engines, but it's not something you would use as your source code. I think at the moment it's more focused on high-performance use cases, e.g. rewriting a CPU-intensive function in C++, compiling it to WebAssembly, and calling it from your JS code. Or taking an existing C++ codebase and running it on the web without really using the DOM. But in the long run, I think WebAssembly will make it possible to do things like DOM interactions in other programming languages.
  - treyhuffine 9y ago
    There was actually a huge consensus on the direction of Web Assembly recently. https://medium.com/@treyhuffine/coding-news-monthly-summary-a2fd77df9e9 https://medium.com/@treyhuffine/coding-news-monthly-summary-...
solidr53 9y ago
this
- sctb 9y ago
  Not here, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
citrusx 9y ago
They're going to have to support it in perpetuity, most likely. There are too many packages written in CS, which are relied on, and which are not really maintained so much.

CS is one of the main reasons I haven't contributed more to Atom. I guess when Atom was started it made sense to use CS, not anymore. Hopefully Github will switch to ES6/7 or TS.

gabrielcsapo 9y ago
also this
uranian 9y ago
Instead of wanting projects to move to a language you know, you can better first learn the language they are written in, and try to understand their decision in the first place. If you know CS very well you would not be so eager to move to Babel transpiler imao. There is also a nice comment in here about a large project that became a misery because of TS. Think twice before you hope!

alangpierce 9y ago

They're already using JavaScript for all new code, and gradually converting their existing code over using decaffeinate (e.g. https://github.com/atom/atom/commit/30cd83f7aa03c023e6103b648906107796472fe8 https://github.com/atom/atom/commit/30cd83f7aa03c023e6103b64... ). But it's a reasonably big codebase and I imagine moving everything over incrementally will take a while.

baby 9y ago
What about moving to web assembly? Would it be relevant? Or is this a Firefox feature only? Or is this not interesting because the point is to write it in javascript?
- alangpierce 9y ago
  WebAssembly will be supported by all browsers and JS engines, but it's not something you would use as your source code. I think at the moment it's more focused on high-performance use cases, e.g. rewriting a CPU-intensive function in C++, compiling it to WebAssembly, and calling it from your JS code. Or taking an existing C++ codebase and running it on the web without really using the DOM. But in the long run, I think WebAssembly will make it possible to do things like DOM interactions in other programming languages.
- treyhuffine 9y ago
  There was actually a huge consensus on the direction of Web Assembly recently. https://medium.com/@treyhuffine/coding-news-monthly-summary-a2fd77df9e9 https://medium.com/@treyhuffine/coding-news-monthly-summary-...

solidr53 9y ago

this

sctb 9y ago
Not here, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

citrusx 9y ago

They're going to have to support it in perpetuity, most likely. There are too many packages written in CS, which are relied on, and which are not really maintained so much.