As I mentioned in my last post, Builder has switched to GJS as it’s dynamic language for plugins. We already support a number of compiled languages including C, C++, Rust, and Vala.
Previously we had used PyGObject. Do to the lack of GTypeInstance support in PyGObject, that isn’t an option currently. I already ported all of Builder’s plugins written in Python to C over the course of a week last summer. That ended up making things both more stable and allow us to ship the GTK 4 port on time.
This past year I wrote a new async/futures framework for GLib called libdex which provides Fibers, Futures, Channels, await, threadpools, io_uring support, and more. That tool heavily uses the same GTypeInstance features that GTK 4 uses.
GJS has improved a lot over the years due to how it is being maintained and it’s importance in the GNOME Shell stack. I’d like to double down on that so Builder can benefit from their hard work. Therefore, if you want to write plugins in JavaScript and maintain them upstream, that’s something I’m happy to see happen.
You can see some examples for how to write a JavaScript plugin for Builder in the examples directory.