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Comment by hbbio | Hacker News Reader

Just looking at the source and finding out it's JavaScript.

Although I'm probably living in a cave and didn't use Linux often on the desktop since years, it is common practice now to write Gtk/Gnome apps in JS? I tought Vala was the cool language for that kind of apps...

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> I tought Vala was the cool language for that kind of apps...

I think you’re about ten years behind the trend.

Nope, new applications are commonly being written in Vala.

For example bookworm, a GTK eBook viewer.

I didn't say all new applications were being written in JS, did I? So any number of counterexamples does not disprove what I said. We were talking about the trend of what people were looking at using now.

Ok, please: what language are people using when they want to create gnome software ? Or the trend of what people are looking at using, if you prefer. Edit: switched two words.

It uses epub.js which i think is really cool for rendering the documents. The UI looks pretty impressive as well. For anyone coming from Calibre, this would look amazing

Kudos to the developer for seeing a need and building something that fills that need with a clean UI. As a developer, I get that the quickest path to building a well featured eBook reader meant building on top of ePub.js.

However, purely from an idealistic engineering perspective (I know, some people do not care at all about that), having to rely on the DOM + a fully featured JavaScript engine to render an ebook is just... insane.

Well, epub is just special HTML. I don't think you strictly need JavaScript, but it's about the easiest way to work with and render HTML. And I imagine rendering PDF is a whole lot messier.

GJS is the easiest way to write Gtk/Gnome apps these days, and it uses the native controls

I saw JavaScript and for a moment, and I was like - "Oh no, not electron again", and moment later I was happy to see that it was not Electron!

Saw that too and dismissed the project.

My PC has plenty of resources, but if I'm going to use a browser to read books, I might as well upload it to Google Play Books and use the browser I already have open for other things. It has the same functionality and my progress and bookmarks are synced across devices.

Granted, epubs are easily converted to HTML, but I shouldn't need an additional few hundreds Mb of RAM to read a 5Mb file.

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