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from the article:

> Canonical's write-up of the work done to improve GNOME is also interesting for the long list of what didn't work and how wrong some of the developers' initial assumptions were—especially regarding GNOME's use of JavaScript. > It turns out JavaScript had next to no effect on performance. So sorry JavaScript haters, but "assuming that JavaScript is slower than everything else written in C" is evidently a bad assumption

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In 2011 gnome 3 was released with a memory leak due to a mismatch between compiled code and Javascript which saw memory allocated during animations that would be freed in no reasonable time frame. Eventually all memory in the system belongs to gnome shell.

As this is really hard to fix they fixed this by constantly running the gc in December 2018. This worked OK but didn't fix the issue for all until 2019.

Does making it broken for 8 years so usability comes 8 years late count as making it slow.

It should be noted that 3.34 has also seen some work on moving stuff from JS to C. Notably animations are now far less dependent on the JS part, with better performance as a result.

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