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by xvilka 2543 days ago
Why don't use the compilable language? Nobody think about resources these days.
3 comments

How do you know they didn't consider resources?

If you want to compile a language you're going to need a compiler and a linker. Do you know how much water it takes to compile a single executable? Water that's better used irrigating a field which could support hundreds of well-written python and bash scripts.

In this case, I don't know how much it matters--EPUB is basically HTML, so you are going to be based around a browser-like component anyway. Might as well code the UI in js.
This isnt electron, GJS uses native GTK controls
README mentions a dependency on webkit2gtk, probably only for the ebook rendering but it's not far from electron in that case.
Yea, webkit2gtk is pretty heavy (or at least it seems that way when trying to compile it), but it might have been the easiest way to render epub files as their render is pretty similar to HTML.

It's all about tradeoffs and I don't think this one is too bad. I'm glad it isn't a pure electron app.

Now we just need decent open hardware for Linux tablets! I'd love to use this program to read books on one of those mythical open source tablets that can run KDE Plasma.