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I played around with gjs in 2013, a long time ago. It’s cool in theory but in practice super frustrating to work with. There was no access to normal JS/npm ecos
by jitl 2y ago
I played around with gjs in 2013, a long time ago. It’s cool in theory but in practice super frustrating to work with. There was no access to normal JS/npm ecosystem at the time; although now the bundler situation probably means you can import some stuff that will work. The debugging / error handling situation was abysmal with a mistake using the native APIs possible to crash the desktop environment and possibly kill all your GUI processes.
If it’s improved a ton maybe it’s interesting; but “you can build or customize gnome with JS” is not really exciting to me because “using gnome” is not something I want to do. I would much rather learn Apple’s toolkit and Swift than invest any amount of time in Gnome.
- freedomben 2y agoI also played with gjs in 2013 and found it super frustrating. It's come a very long way since then. At that point it really felt like a giant hack, and did have all the downsides you mention. I'm really glad they didn't abandon it though!
- bobajeff 2y agoYeah i too played with it recently. It's actually not too bad. I was able to use vscode with ts-for-gir * to get the js language server working. The documentation seems like it's pretty good though it's a little hard to know where to start. Ultimately, I decided to go with electron since it just made more sense for what I wanted. Which I had a feeling would be the case but it's still really cool that you make gnome apps with JavaScript. * https://github.com/gjsify/ts-for-gir https://github.com/gjsify/ts-for-gir