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Comment by throwsincenotpc | Hacker News Reader

They need to watch out because apparently the Gnome foundation wants to ditch Vala for Rust to cut cost and "attract more developers" :

https://siliconislandblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/thoughts-...

> and support a preferred programming language (Vala)

https://launchpad.net/elementary

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Oh dearie me... Everything depends on GObject, they wrote Vala to have a high-level programming language, they wrote GObject Introspection to generate bindings for all other languages, yet they think it's a good idea to ditch all of this and move to Rust (no inheritance, which is crucial for their Gtk+ widgets), only because it's so hip right now?

They lost their mojo because of their weird decisions in the past and not because their stack isn't hip. How many JavaScript developers did they attract by writing the Gnome Shell in JavaScript? And the Rust community is a tiny fraction of the JavaScript community.

They are trying to turn a donkey into a racehorse. And if they do a full rewrite, people will have forgotten about Gnome by the time they are finished. Someone give them Joel Spolsky's article on refactoring to read.

Gnome foundation: when you finally gain traction, you press reset, bravo.

lol right, I expect them to move to QT anyway ... /s

I agree with the article. Vala is a wonderful language, but it doesn't have the necessary tooling built around it.

> I agree with the article. Vala is a wonderful language, but it doesn't have the necessary tooling built around it.

Sure but they had like 10 years to do that, I remember a french guy who ever wrote a complete IDE with autocompletition + package manager for Vala on Windows. Support from the Gnome Foundation ? zip .

Oh, and I even found the link.

http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/24

So the tooling my ass, they just don't want to bother with Vala

No, I'm talking about gdb support, for example. I'm talking for a testing framework (right now you have to write your own build process capable of bundling the unit tests with your source).

They still had 10 years to do that. complaining about the lack of tooling they didn't develop is idiotic, they are in charge of the language themselves.

Well, not all people have the expertise or willingness (in case of volunteers) to work on this. Switching to Rust would allow them to leverage somebody else's work.

Also, GObject itself made a lot of sense in an era when C was dominant. Maybe now, not so much.

Switching to Rust isn't going to solve Gnome management problems. You could make the case that they should ditch Gtk and adopt Qt, it would actually make more sense than rewriting Gtk in Rust given the amount of work it represents. But you complaining about the tools that don't exist is still ridiculous, the problem is why these weren't developed at first place.

Obviously, it won't. But it would at least free up some manpower.

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