Tag: gnome

Gnome-shell uses CSS processing code that dates from HippoCanvas, a CSS-aware canvas from around 2006. It uses libcroco to parse CSS, and implements selector matching by hand in C.

This code is getting rather dated, and libcroco is unmaintained.

I've been reading the code for StTheme and StThemeNode, and it looks very feasible to port it gradually to Rust, by using the same crates that librsvg uses, and eventually removing libcroco altogether: gnome-shell is the last module that uses libcroco in distro packages.

Last week, I went to the fifth Rust+GNOME hackfest which was in Berlin again. My goal for this hackfest was to fix this issue I opened nearly three years ago. The problem is that sometimes you want to create a widget or an object and set some properties at construction time. This might be needed when you want to set construct-only properties. For instance, you might want to create a webkit2gtk::WebView with a WebContext and a UserContentManager at the same time. That’s why a constructor was manually written for this use case.

Last week, I was working on improving the integration of Rust with GNOME libraries at the third Hackfest, which happened this time in Madrid.