this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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44% Of GNOME Core Apps Are Written In C, 13% In JavaScript & 10% In Rust (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 2 days ago by cm0002@toast.ooo to c/linux@programming.dev
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GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas.

Of the official GNOME Core apps, Sophie found that 44.8% of them are written in the C programming language. That's followed by Vala with 20.7% and then JavaScript at 13.8%. Following JS is Rust with 10.3% of the GNOME Cores apps codebase being in Rust. Trailing Rust is Python at 6.9% and C++ at 3.45%.

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[โ€“] kbal@fedia.io 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Okay I'm not surprised that C and Rust are popular, but I didn't expect there to be so much Vala in there.

[โ€“] bitcrafter@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago

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.