python is less verbose in lines than C et al in my experience. Comparing lines reminds me of that tesla guy that judged employees by the amount of lines of code.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
106 points (95.7% liked)
Linux
10819 readers
638 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Oh, that underlines my impression of Python being used more widely for Gnome programs.
Lines of code is such a shit metric.
In the low level languages like c and rust, it takes 2 to 3 times as many lines to do the same thing. It's a sensationalistic way to try and share information and I think the intent is disingenuous rather than ignorant.
You could always read the original source and find out the intent, but who has time for that?
I did read the source, but that doesn't change what I said. Lines of code is a shit metric. The source even specifically says, "...line of code is of course a questionable metric" then says how 400k lines of rust are auto generated in bindings.
So after re-reading, the intent of the article is to compare lines of code between different languages and their percentage of gnome. It's apples and oranges, and a meaningless, shit metric.
The bizarre thing is that they are only analysing something like 40 programs/library. You could reach the same conclusion clicking through their gitlab for a few minutes.
The translation rate is the actually interesting part.
Javascript? In Gtk?
13% JS? 😬
Okay I'm not surprised that C and Rust are popular, but I didn't expect there to be so much Vala in there.
I was also a bit surprised to see that Vala is so widely adopted, but it is a very natural fit when you consider that it was specifically designed to use GObject as its OOP implementation, making it essentially a "native" speaker in GNOME.
I think that's the reason why GNOME is getting kinda sloppy with their code right there. I use something GNOME-based (in Cinnamon), but that's before the oxidization and JS surveillance code was added. (Last part was sarcastic)
Those pie charts are bad
Bad how?
The slices aren't in any reasonable order. This even led to this mistake in the article:
C was in use for 76% of the codebase followed by Rust at 10.3% and Vala at 3.77%.
(Python was between Rust and Vala at 4.76% for the library languages)
lol yeah, now that you mentioned it, the order seems to be random or some totally unrelated metric to the charts. 🥴