Free software at 40°C

It’s that time of year again, time for a belated reflection on the GUADEC conference!

In August I traveled to Thessaloniki, Greece, to attend first the annual GNOME Foundation board handover day, then the advisory board meeting, then the GUADEC conference and associated unconference days.

The board discussion focused quite a lot on the strategic goals for the GNOME Foundation which you can hear more about in executive director Neil McGovern’s talk. Nuritzi has also blogged about the process of putting together these strategic goals.

One of the goals that’s most important to me personally (and in fact, in a slightly different form it was part of my original candidacy statement the first time I was elected to the GNOME Foundation board) is:

Evaluate and adopt new technologies to stay competitive with proprietary desktops.

In the evening after the board handover I got a chance to talk about this with some GNOME people over gyros and why I think it’s important — but that’s a topic that could fill an entire blog post! And I intend to publish one at some point.

I’d like to describe some of the talks that I thought were highlights during the conference days.

Setting a Positive Voice For GNOME, Britt Yazel (video) — One of a surprisingly large number of talks this year about how a large free software project is made up of humans, something which people tend to forget.

Hack: Embedding Learning Tools in the OS, Meg Ford / Manuel Quiñones (video) — This is a great talk about some of the cool stuff in a project which is quite familiar to me; as I had worked on it for a year. I had not really gotten a chance to take a step back and see how cool it actually is, and this talk brought that home for me.

Environmentally Friendly GNOME, Philip Withnall (video) — Fantastic use of the relatively little data we have, to do quite a lot of order-of-magnitude calculations about GNOME’s environmental footprint, as well as suggestions on how to reduce it.

About Maintainers and Contributors, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (video) — Another talk about humans, and one of the reasons why I think this conference will be regarded as a turning point in GNOME’s history. Georges talks honestly about the struggles that many of us face when we become the public face of a well-known project.

Free Software / Utopia, Deb Nicholson (video) — A strong closer for the conference, and a strong statement of values for a community that is — sorry if I sound like a broken record — made up of humans. I fully support the idea that we shouldn’t just try to equal proprietary software, but to do better, not only technically, but in our treatment of humans!

There were a lot of difficult decisions to make as to which conference track to follow and I ended up switching back and forth a lot, and in addition I was rehearsing my own talk. This meant I still had to miss some things that I would have liked to attend, like (unfortunately) the workshops on Saturday.

On Saturday there was also the annual meeting of the GNOME Foundation, but I think plenty of other people have blogged about that already.

On Sunday I delievered my talk (video, slides) and started to run out of time near the end, so the video shows how I gradually started talking faster and faster… Happily, a few people expressed interest in taking on some of the projects for GJS that I suggested in the talk, and I hope that when the next round of Outreachy and Google Summer of Code internships come around I will be able to be a mentor again.

During the unconference days I did not actually stick very much to the published schedule; I was mostly occupied with hallway conversations. I spent one day with the travel committee talking about what we could do to improve the travel sponsorship process, and taking advantage of the fact that most of the committee was in the same place to review the open tickets.

I also spent some time hacking on GJS, both by myself and with others: Meg Ford and Marco Trevisan started fixing some GJS bugs.

The last day was filled with a whirlwind tour of the many museums of Thessaloniki — anyone who knows me personally knows that I love museums and could have stayed for many more hours in each museum.

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance.

GUADEC 2018 Reminiscences

This year’s GUADEC in Almería, Spain, was over two months ago, and so here is a long overdue post about it. It was so long ago that I might as well call it a reminiscence! This will be a different kind of post than the ones I’ve done in past years, as plenty of other bloggers have already posted summaries about the talks.

Board of Directors

I didn’t even get to see that many talks anyway, as this was my first GUADEC after being elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors and I found myself doing a lot of running around to complete things. The board has to prepare for a number of meetings including the GNOME Foundation’s Annual General Meeting that’s always held at GUADEC, and so there was plenty of preparation to be done.

So, except for a few sessions, I mainly followed the “hallway track” this year.

It’s an exciting time to be on the board; it’s been in the news recently that the GNOME Foundation has received two substantial donations, and is hiring some new roles. If you want more information and background, Rosanna Yuen, director of operations, explains all about it in this GUADEC talk.

Interns

Somehow I found myself mentoring two interns this summer, Avi Zajac and Evan Welsh, and both of them were able to attend GUADEC. (I co-mentored Evan with my coworker Manuel Quiñones, who unfortunately could not be there.) I had not done a good job introducing them to each other, but they connected with each other and realized that they were both working with me! If you haven’t already, make sure to read Avi’s blog post and Evan’s blog post for their perspectives on how it went. I was glad to have both of them there and really enjoyed meeting up in person.

Both internships have finished up in the meantime. Evan’s website is viewable here, as well as some improvements to DevDocs which I hope to deploy soon. Avi’s project was released as a technical preview in GNOME 3.30 and will be covered in my next blog post.

JavaScript Talk

I gave one scheduled talk, on GJS and JavaScript, and one unscheduled talk, on Endless Code.

I will cover the material from the JavaScript talk in my next post about the new features in GJS, but for now I wanted to post the slides for everyone’s reference. The video of the talk is here.

Endless Hack Talk

I was voted into one of the conference’s open talk slots with a proposal to talk about Endless Code (since then, renamed to Endless Hack). This is a new (well, it was new at the time of the conference) project at Endless. It’s a continuation of this feature which (I didn’t work on, but) my coworkers demoed about two years ago:

Want to hack on an app in @endlessglobal? Simple, just flip over the window and start coding. All code, build tools, and deps are there. pic.twitter.com/T3maWdw2eI

— Jono Bacon (@jonobacon) January 5, 2017

The Endless Hack product generalizes this idea to the whole desktop. The idea is that you should be able to tinker with everything, and there’s a narrative that guides you along the way and teaches you programming concepts. It’s aimed at children and young teenagers. Although this product hasn’t been released yet, and although some of the source code is currently open it’s not in a finished or usable state yet, I did want to talk about it at GUADEC because I think the ability to learn by tinkering is an important part of the free software experience and a direct consequence of one of the Four Software Freedoms, and it’s something the GNOME community should be aware of.

We also made a survey asking people about their experience learning how to program, or not learning how to program, and it’s still open, because I did not do a very good job in the talk of publicizing the link! You can fill it out here.

I haven’t dared to watch the video of me talking completely unrehearsed, but you can watch it here if you want.

Unconference

I had high hopes for organizing a GJS unconference session like last year, but after a certain point I was just completely tired out. We did eventually have a GJS session that consisted of people hacking on their favourite thing. Happily, I was able to convince Georges Stavracas to fix a regression that was preventing GNOME Shell from starting. I got a chance to work with Meg Ford on testing with JavaScript, and I also got some work done on the GJS debugger, a new feature in GNOME 3.30. I will talk about all this and more in my next post!

We also used some of the unconference time for a kickoff session for the GNOME Developer Center. Bastian Ilsø is leading this initiative and has a lot of material for you to read on what’s happened in the meantime.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for making it possible for me to attend the conference and the board meetings.

Thank you to my coworker Lisette Silva for convincing me to submit the open talk and giving some last-minute feedback beforehand.

Wrapping up GUADEC 2017

I’m now back home after attending GUADEC 2017 in Manchester, followed by a week of half-vacation traveling around the Netherlands and visiting old friends. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet others in the GNOME community once again; having gone to a few hackfests and conferences in the past two years, I now recognize many friendly faces that I am happy to get a chance to see from time to time.

Talks

Here’s what I attended during the conference; I’ll link to the videos and provide a sentence or two of commentary.

• The GNOME Way, Allan Day (video) — for me, one of the two highlights of the conference, a great statement of what makes GNOME tick, and a great opener for its 20th birthday.
• Limited Connectivity, Endless Apps, Joaquim Rocha (video) — although already familiar to me, it was a nice overview of the product that I work on at Endless.
• State of the Builder, Christian Hergert — one of these days I will start using Builder as soon as I can find some time to get it to learn my preferred keybindings.
• The Battle over Our Technology, Karen Sandler (video) — the second of the two conference highlights, a timely reminder of why free software is important.
• Seamless Integration to Hack Desktop Applications, Simon Schampijer (video) — my coworker and fellow-person-whose-last-name-gets-pronounced-wrong Simon showed off one of the most empowering features that I have ever seen.
• Progressive Web Apps: an Opportunity for GNOME, Stephen Pearce (video) — I have been reading a lot about progressive web apps recently and am both excited and skeptical. (Stephen also made a webkit game in GJS in just one day.)
• Different Ways of Outreaching Newcomers, Julita Inca (video) — it was fantastic to see this legendary GNOME mentor and organizer speak in person.
• Lightning talks by the GSoC and Outreachy interns (video) — I always admire the intern sessions because I would have soiled myself had I had to speak to a 300-person conference room back when I was an intern. Hopefully next year the interns will have a session earlier in the day so their audience is fresher though! Also a shout out to my coworkers Kate Lasalle-Klein and Robin Tafel who are not interns but also gave a lightning talk during this session about working together with the GNOME design team. (If you’re looking for it in the other lightning talk video, you’re not finding it because it was in this session.)
• Fantastic Layouts and Where to Find Them, Martin Abente Lahaye (video) — a great introduction to Emeus, the constraint layout manager, with a surprise appearance from an airplane hack.
• Replacing C Library Code with Rust: What I Learned, Federico Mena Quintero (slides) — I am mentoring a Summer of Code student, Luke, who is doing some investigation into converting parts of GJS into Rust, and this talk really helped me understand some things from his work that I’ve been struggling with.
• Continuous: Past, Present, Future, Emmanuele Bassi (video) — this talk made me want to help out on that lonely, lonely build sheriff mountain.
• A Brief History of GNOME, Jonathan Blandford (video) — I had seen it before, but an hour well spent.
• GNOME to 2020 and Beyond, Neil McGovern (video) — by turns optimistic and pessimistic, the new GNOME executive director talked about the future.
• What’s Coverity Static Analysis Ever Done for Us?, Philip Withnall (video) — my coworker and fellow-person-with-an-excellent-first-name Philip talked about static analysis, which I cannot wait to start using on GJS.
• Building a Secure Desktop with GNOME Technologies, Matthew Garrett (video) — the excellent “raise your hand if your system is bugging you to install an update right now” line made this talk for me.
• GNOME Build Strategies and BuildStream, Tristan Van Berkom (video) — not quite what I expected, but luckily I got a better idea of what BuildStream does from the unconference session.
• Bringing GNOME Home to Ubuntu, Tim Lunn (video) — it was a pleasure to meet Tim in person, who did the SpiderMonkey porting work on GJS before me, and whose commits I have often referred to.
• GitLab, Carlos Soriano — I’m really excited to kick Bugzilla out of my workflow as soon as I can.
• Microsoft ❤️ Linux, Julian Atanasoae — If nothing else Julian is brave to get up in front of this audience and sing the praises of Microsoft. I am skeptically optimistic; sure, Microsoft is doing some great things for open source, I even had a slide about some Microsoft tools in my talk, but on the other hand let’s not forget they were still trying to undermine and destroy our community not too long ago.
• How to Get Better Mileage out of Glade, Juan Pablo Ugarte (video) — Slides created in Glade, what more could you ask for?
• Lightning talks (video) —The highlight for me of the second lightning talk session was Sri’s self-described “rant.” There were a few talks in the lineup that I felt it was too bad didn’t get any time.

There were also so many talks that were programmed opposite the talks that I decided to go see. It seemed like that happened more often than last year! (Either my interests have broadened, or the quality of the talks is increasing…) I will be watching many videos in the coming days, now that they have been released, but I was especially sad not to see the two talks on animations by Jakub Steiner and Tobias Bernard because they were opposite (and immediately after, respectively) my own talk!

And the video of my talk is now published as well, although like many people I find it excruciating to watch myself on video; the rest of you can watch it, I’ll watch this instead.

Unconference

The unconference part of the conference (where people propose topics, get together with like-minded attendees in a conference room, and talk or work together) was held in a nice workspace. I had one session on GJS on Monday where we first discussed how the Ubuntu desktop team (I got to meet Ken VanDine, Iain Lane, and Chris Coulson, as well as connect with Tim Lunn again) was going to deploy Mozilla’s security updates to Javascript (and therefore GJS and GNOME Shell) in Ubuntu’s long-term support releases. Then Stephen Pearce joined and suggested a GJS working group in order to make development more visible.

Later I joined the GNOME Shell performance session where I rebased Christian Hergert’s GJS profiler code and showed Jonas Adahl how it worked; we profiled opening and closing the overview.

On the second day I joined the Continuous and Builder sessions. Builder was looking good on a giant TV set!

On the third day I attended the BuildStream session and I’m quite excited about trying it out for a development workflow while hacking on a component of a Flatpak runtime, which is a shaky task at best using the current Flatpak tools.

In the afternoon I technically “had another GJS session” though it’s my experience on the third unconference day that all the sessions melt into one. This time many people went on a hike in the afternoon. I was very sad to have missed it, since I love hiking, but I was having an allergy attack at the time which made it difficult for me to be outside. However, I spent the afternoon working on the GObject class stuff for GJS instead, and chatting with people.

Social events

This GUADEC conference had the best social event on Saturday night: a GNOME 20th birthday party, complete with cake, old farts Q&A panel, trivia quiz, raffle, and a blast from the past dance floor with music from back when GNOME started. There was even an afterparty way into the small hours … which I did not go to because my talk was in the first slot on Sunday morning!

Apart from that there were many opportunities to connect with people, from day 1 through 6. One thing I like about GUADEC is that the days are not stuffed full of talks and there is plenty of time to have casual conversations with people. One “hallway session” that I had, for example, was a conversation with Marco Barisione, talking about the reverse debuggers RR and UndoDB. Another was with with Sri Ramkrishna, following on from his lightning “rant” on Sunday, about what kind of help beginning app writers are looking for, whether they can get it from tutorials or Stack Overflow, and what kinds of things get in their way.

Thanks

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance. I’m really glad to have been able to join in this year.

Inventing GObject ES6 classes

Hello again! If you’re a GJS user, I’d like your opinion and ideas. After my last post where I talked about new features coming in GNOME 3.26 to GJS, GNOME’s Javascript engine, I’m happy to say that the patches are nearly ready to be landed. We just need to figure out how to build SpiderMonkey 52 consistently even though Mozilla hasn’t made an official standalone release of it yet.

A better literal depiction of JAVA SCRIPT I could not ask for… (Public domain image courtesy of Engin_Akyurt)

As I reported last time:

After that is done, I will refactor GJS’s class system (Lang.Class and GObject.Class). I believe this needs to be done before GNOME 3.26. That’s because [we will] gain ES6 classes, and I want to avoid the situation where we have two competing, and possibly incompatible, ways to write classes.

That’s what I’m busy doing now, in the run-up to GUADEC later this month, and I wanted to think out loud in this blog post, and give GJS users a chance to comment.

First of all, the legacy Lang.Class classes will continue to work. You will be able to write ES6 classes that inherit from legacy classes, so you can start using ES6 classes without refactoring all of your code at once.

That was the good news, now the bad

However, there is not an obvious way to carry over the ability to create GObject classes and interfaces from legacy classes to ES6 classes. The main problem is that Lang.Class and its subclasses formed a metaclass framework. This was used to carry out certain activities at the time the class object itself was constructed, such as registering with the GType system.

ES6 classes don’t have a syntax for that, so we’ll have to get a bit creative. My goals are to invent something (1) that’s concise and pleasant to use, and (2) that doesn’t get in the way when classes gain more features in future ES releases; that is, not too magical. (Lang.Class is pretty magical, but then again, there wasn’t really an alternative at the time.)

Here is how the legacy classes worked, with illustrations of all the possible bells and whistles:

	const MyClass = new Lang.Class({
	Name: 'MyClass',
	GTypeName: 'MyNamespaceMyClass',
	Extends: GObject.Object,
	Implements: [Gio.Initable, MyCustomInterface],
	Properties: {
	'prop': GObject.ParamSpec.int( /* etc., etc. */ ),
	},
	Signals: {
	'signal': { param_types: [ /* etc., etc. */ ] },
	},
	_init(props={}) {
	this.parent(props);
	// etc.
	},
	get prop() { /* … */ },
	method(arg) { /* … */ },
	});

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legacy.js

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The metaclass magic in Lang.Class notices that the class extends GObject.Object, and redirects the construction of the class object to GObject.Class. There, the other magic properties such as Properties and Signals are processed and removed from the prototype, and it calls a C function to register the type with the GObject type system.

Without metaclasses, it’s not possible to automatically carry out magic like that at the time a class object is constructed. However, that is exactly the time when we need to register the type with GObject. So, you pretty much need to remember to call a function after the class declaration to do the registering.

The most straightforwardly translated (fictional) implementation might look something like this:

	class MyClass extends GObject.Object {
	static get GTypeName { return 'MyNamespaceMyClass'; }
	static get Implements { return [Gio.Initable, MyCustomInterface]; }
	static get Properties {
	return {
	'prop': GObject.ParamSpec.int( /* etc., etc. */ ),
	};
	}
	static get Signals {
	return {
	'signal': { /* etc. */ },
	};
	}
	constructor(props={}) {
	super(props);
	// etc.
	}
	get prop() { /* … */ }
	method(arg) { /* … */ }
	}
	GObject.registerClass(MyClass);

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verbose.js

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The fictional GObject.registerClass() function would take the role of the metaclass’s constructor.

This is a step backwards in a few ways compared to the legacy classes, and very unsatisfying. ES6 classes don’t yet have syntax for fields, only properties with getters, and the resulting static get syntax is quite unwieldy. Having to call the fictional registerClass() function separately from the class is unpleasant, because you can easily forget it.

On the other hand, if we had decorators in the language we’d be able to make something much more satisfying. If you’re familiar with Python’s decorators, these are much the same thing: the decorator is a function which takes the object that it decorates as input, performs some action on the object, and returns it. There is a proposed decorator syntax for Javascript that allows you to decorate classes and class properties. This would be an example, with some more fictional API:

	@GObject.Class('MyNamespaceMyClass')
	@GObject.implements([Gio.Initable, MyCustomInterface])
	@GObject.signal('signal', { /* etc. */ })
	class MyClass extends GObject.Object {
	constructor(props={}) {
	super(props);
	// etc.
	}
	@GObject.property.int('Short name', 'Blurb', GObject.ParamFlags.READABLE, 42)
	get prop() { /* etc. */ }
	method(arg) { /* etc. */ }
	}

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decorators.js

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This is a lot more concise and natural, and the property decorators are similar to the equivalent in PyGObject, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist. Decorators are still only a proposal, and none of the major browser engines implement them yet. Nonetheless, we can take the above syntax as an inspiration, use a class expression, and move the registerClass() function around it and the GObject stuff outside of it:

	var MyClass = GObject.registerClass({
	GTypeName: 'MyNamespaceMyClass',
	Implements: [Gio.Initable, MyInterface],
	Properties: { 'prop': GObject.ParamSpec.int( /* etc. */ ) },
	Signals: { 'signal': { /* etc. */ } },
	}, class MyClass extends GObject.Object {
	constructor(props={}) {
	super(props);
	// etc.
	}
	get prop() { /* … */ }
	method(arg) { /* … */ }
	});

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class.js

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	var MyInterface = GObject.registerInterface({
	GTypeName: 'MyNamespaceMyInterface',
	Requires: [Gio.Initable],
	Properties: { 'prop': GObject.ParamSpec.int( /* etc. */ ) },
	Signals: { 'signal': { /* etc. */ } },
	}, class MyInterface {
	get prop() { /* … */ }
	method(arg) { /* … */ }
	});

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interface.js

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Here, the body of the class is almost identical to what it would be with the decorator syntax. All the extra stuff for GObject is contained at the top of the class like it would be with the decorators. We don’t have the elegance of the property decorator, but this is quite an improvement on the first iteration. It’s not overly magical, it even acts like a decorator: it takes a class expression, and gives back a GObject-ized class. And when decorators eventually make it into standard Javascript, the basic idea is the same, so converting your code will be easy enough. (Or those who use transpiling tools can already go ahead and implement the decorator-based API.)

This is the best API I’ve been able to come up with so far. What do you think? Would you want to use it? Reply to this post or come talk to me in #javascript on GNOME IRC.

Next steps

Note first of all that none of this code exists yet. Depending on what feedback I get here, I hope to have a draft version working before GUADEC, and around the same time I’ll post a more detailed proposal to the javascript-list mailing list.

In addition, I will be speaking about this and more at GUADEC in my talk, “Modern Javascript in GNOME“. If you are attending, come talk to me there! Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and accommodations.