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vinszent / gnome-twitch

Enjoy Twitch on your GNU/Linux desktop
http://gnome-twitch.vinszent.com
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Future development #367

Open vinszent opened 6 years ago

vinszent commented 6 years ago

A lot of you may have noticed that the development pace has slowed down a bit since the last release. The main reason for this is Twitch constantly burning devs with changes to their already unstable APIs and causing GT to break constantly.

Then at the beginning of the year they announced that they are planning on axing their existing API and replacing it with another one. This new API only has a fraction of the functionality that the old one has and in it's current state would render GNOME Twitch and similar applications unable to function.

The response from Twitch has also been non-existent (see here) and many devs are worried, including myself, about what the future for 3rd party applications will be. I'm somewhat suspicious that this is indeed a move to stop applications such as GT and forcing users to access Twitch via their crappy website...

So I will be putting GT on somewhat of hiatus until Twitch releases more information on what their plan is as I don't want to sink a lot of time into something that might be dead in a few months anyway because of them.

I will be looking at the Twitch dev forums and outlets everyday for updates and as soon as they announce something positive, I'll get right back into development. Until then v0.4.2 should work in its current state, at least until 31 December 2018 when Twitch has announced to finally remove the API for good.

ptkato commented 6 years ago

If Twitch indeed do axe their API, what will be done about GT code? Reshaped into something else, maybe?

vinszent commented 6 years ago

It seems like Twitch has decided to delay the end-of-life of their current API https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/twitch-api-update-delaying-v5-end-of-life/16277. While this doesn't solve all of the issues I listed above, it does alleviate some concern I had with continuing development.

I've been wanting to rewrite GT in a more maintainable language for a while (see #199). So I will take the opportunity to slowly migrate from the current C code base to Rust which is quite mature at this point, has good community and corporate support and already as usable libraries for GLib (GTK+, GStreamer, etc) libraries. Plus it integrates well with C, so I can rewrite parts one at a time.

So look forward to more stuff coming soon!

Techwolf commented 6 years ago

Will moving to Rust drop the webkit deps?

TingPing commented 6 years ago

Will moving to Rust drop the webkit deps?

Not inherently.

vinszent commented 6 years ago

No, but I intend to remove the WebKit dep anyway.