As 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 ?
Building a javascript engine is super simple. But to build one that has performance on par with the current crop will take you - as a single person - a lifetime and by then the state of the art will have moved on.
The performance is hard, but the bug-for-bug compatibility is what will kill you.
Wait, 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...
I can't wait to see what sort of strategic shit they will try to get away this time leveraging "superior" technology.
I find myself hoping Microsoft makes a comeback and they are really doing a lot to win developers which I think is the right move. Obviously, they are a huge platform and developers inherently will be using it but they have taken a lot of great steps like open sourcing this engine as well as other projects. The Code editor they released is built on Atom Electron and seems more performant than Atom in the few experien…
Engineer on the Chakra team here. As the blog post says, we are definitely interested in going cross-platform. Which platforms would you be interested in seeing first?
"I was literally blown away by Visual Studio Code" ^^ Wow, Microsoft should really be more cautious with their code. There seems to be an epidemic of injuries. I'm so sorry to hear about your accident. I hope your injuries were not serious! :-D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jh4Mpgbi4A
Building a javascript engine is super simple. But to build one that has performance on par with the current crop will take you - as a single person - a lifetime and by then the state of the art will have moved on.
The performance is hard, but the bug-for-bug compatibility is what will kill you.
If they go full SaaS I would not be surprized if they go Open Source on Windows itself, seriously. I think for that to happen Nadella needs one big win/turnaround and the shareholders might be on board.
Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, a couple of months back, Mark Russinovich (of SysInternals fame) gave a talk somewhere and mentioned that they were looking into that. Sounds kind of strange to say it out loud, though. ;-)
He said it was not impossible, he never said MS was considering it ATM
Wait, 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...
The next Firefox Nightly build should get 84% on that page, much closer to Edge than Firefox 44 (74%). I work on SpiderMonkey and I'm super excited about this news. All JS engines have added more-or-less similar performance optimizations but often implemented differently and I'm really interested to see what the Chakra team did. I'd be happy to write a blog post on it next month, if people are interested.
Speaking as someone tuning a JS game, I focus on V8 over other engines because there are great articles around that explain in detail what v8 knows how to optimize, what causes functions to deopt, what kicks object property lookups into slow mode, etc. Articles explaining this for SpiderMonkey would be greatly appreciated!
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…
Quote Shakespeare and/or Dickens so I can see whether their use of that word improves the passages, or carries any signal at all for that matter. Otherwise I'll just assume that since they wrote a lot, there's going to be some mediocre bits and padding in it. For all I know, they might simply not have paid attention.