Gg
Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
191–200 of 283 posts
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
OS X. I don't use it but I think it'd have great value. I often hear engineers talk about how they don't want to work with IE because they have to boot up a VM to use it. So...they don't even test it, they know nothing about it except for how IE used to be 10 years ago when they still used Windows machines. That'd be the coolest thing since it'd encourage developers that shy away from MS technology to dive into it.
Have you heard of www.browserstack.com ? Easy way to test different platforms without VMs.
yeah but it's paid, needs internet access, and requires some sort of setup. Plus, most OS X devs would do this ONLY for IE. Which is a barrier of entry.
Downloading and installing IE browser on OSX is a much better solution. And this way, you have a browser that people can use casually as well. Since it has awesome ES6 support, that makes it even better for JS Devs.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here, meet a dictionary of the english language: Literary [lemma 2]: in effect, virtually It's a use that predates Shakespeare.
It's a term that has two accepted meanings, the other meaning being the total opposite of the intended, making it a meaningless "flavor" word. Leave it out of phrases from now on, and the phrase will not lose any meaning or clarity.
>It's a term that has two accepted meanings, the other meaning being the total opposite of the intended, making it a meaningless "flavor" word.
No, it's a term that has two accepted meanings that context makes perfectly clear which one was meant.
Like "bad" (which can mean actually bad, or "great" as slang, both meanings in the dictionary). In fact many common terms have that characteristic, including fast ("moving quickly" or "fixed in place"), dust (which also means removing dust), etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
>Leave it out of phrases from now on, and the phrase will not lose any meaning or clarity.
It's not meant to add to the core meaning of a phrase. It's meant to emphasize something in it. Without it the literal (sic) meaning would be the same, but the intended impact of the phrase would be lessened.
It's like: "I don't care for your bonus" and "I don't care for your fucking bonus". The meaning would be the same without the expletive but the intended emphasis and impact lost.
Something that Dickens and Shakespeare (who used it that way among tons of others) understood.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is actually relevant here is whether the percentage that Google considers Chrome to be valuable to their company times the resources of the company is competitive against the resources Mozilla has (times the percentage that Mozilla considers the browser their focus, as they clearly spend a lot of money on side projects people sometimes seem to enjoy, such as Persona). Mozilla is small enough (at least in compari…
And not all of us at Mozilla actually work on Firefox. I don't know the number but we work on a lot of different things.
Maybe keep more focus on Firefox then?
As it has been losing ground for a decade or so, and without it there is no Mozilla. I see some crazy initiatives obviously doomed to fail (like the mobile OS), which are worrying.
Coming up with a Servo based browser that's both more secure due to Rust AND faster due to parallel processing, and a better native-look-and-feel story (at least on the Mac) would be good to catch up with the others. And better developer tools, as Chrome has eaten that influential segment (web devs) up.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#195As a mere mortal - How hard would it be for a day programmer to built something cool like an JavaScript engine ? I sometimes have crazy thoughts about the world ending. How hard would it be to built your own javascript engine from scratch ?
A toy javascript interpreter is quite easy. But a high-performance, production-ready engine is a totally different story.
Anyone have a recommendation for a good place to begin, if I was interested in writing a toy javascript interpreter?
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you allow threads to share memory arbitrarily you need to add locking to all internal VM structures, which is going to be a significant slowdown. Also it's not (any longer) considered good practice to have languages that allow mutable memory sharing since that makes software unreliable, so it's not really a good idea. Without arbitrary memory sharing, multi-threading is already supported with web workers.
Web Worker is very weird in that you have to have a separate file.
Agreed! FWIW this is why I made Operative. It gives you a way of writing "inline" JS that utilizes web workers (caveat: not actually inline; no scope/context access of course). It provides good support across browsers and fallbacks for envs where web workers don't exist (and ~all the in-between cases): https://github.com/padolsey/operative
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#197Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...
warning: not all of the graphs in the venturebeat article start from 0!
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#198Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s...
Yes, that's surprising. Another es6 compat page: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
I'm hoping Chrome steps up its game. It's embarrassing.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#199I have a somewhat off topic question: is there anything in the design of Javascript that mandates single-threadedness? Could any Javascript engine implement threads? I'm asking because I'm wondering if Node.js's evented approach is the only way to do things.
It used to be possible to write Firefox extensions that used multi-threaded JS; however, like any other language, accessing the DOM was not threadsafe (so you can't have a window be your global object, and therefore they needed to live in separate source files). As JS lacked native support for threading, you also had to be very, very careful and often ended up with less obvious threading issues anyway.
In the last few years SpiderMonkey (Firefox's JS engine) has dropped support for this more and more, and these days you can't anymore. But that's a consequence of the engine implementation, and not the language.
Re: Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source
#200There's no such thing as 'firefox alpha', its 'firefox nightly'
Kinda odd to see when they get the rest right and they're engineers. feels like they dont know firefox o.O