Why the quotation marks? If I recall correctly, Vala compiles (by way of C) into native code.
GNOME uses a lot of JavaScript nowadays, so large parts of an application can be interpreted. Here are the GJS docs, it gives you an idea of how much JavaScript there is: https://gjs-docs.gnome.org/
Haven't they gradually been moving away from gjs though?
Does Elementary use Gnome? I thought it was something else. It's been years since I've been on Elementary, but it didn't feel like it was just a Gnome skin iirc.
it uses pantheon
To my understanding, Pantheon is built from scratch, but it is still GTK. So it has a lot of similar fundamentals as GNOME.
Sorry, meant native as in made by the elementaryOS team (it's an Ubuntu-based distro).