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QuickJS JavaScript Engine

bellard.org

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Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#211

Post by s_gourichon »

ksec wrote: post #96
tombert wrote: post #25

Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

> 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life?

Do you ask this to know if he's a real guy or an AI or a pseudo for group of persons like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki ?

I know Fabrice a little. He's definitely real, smart and humble.

Visited him at his workplace about ten years ago when he worked at Netgem.

We also have a common friend we visit with spouse and kids, where we discover and discuss new gadgets (physics-based, drones, mechanical puzzles, etc). One day we played with a kind of padlock where the lock procedure implied to move a sort-of 4-direction joystick. The trick was: you could do any number of moves to lock it. It seemed like it allowed to store an arbitrary long sequence of numbers in a finite mechanical system. Fabrice arrived, heard us explain, thought, and said "the mechanics probably implements some sort of hash algorithm". That was the answer.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#212

Post by dig1 »

ksec wrote: post #96
tombert wrote: post #25

Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

Guy L. Steele - no proper language design can go without him. I think he is the only person who enjoys writing language reference manuals and is able to explain every language detail mathematically and linguistically everyone can understand. He was behind C, Java, Scheme, Common Lisp, ECMA, Fortan...

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#213

Post by bakery2k »

a_lieb wrote: post #201

The benchmark scores [1] he gives only stack it up against other embeddable engines. It cuts those to ribbons, but can someone who's familiar with JavaScript performance weigh in on how it competes with the most popular engines like V8 and SpiderMonkey? It would be interesting if this is so fast that you could re-implement Node using QuickJS instead of V8, or even make a WebKit- or Gecko-based browser with QuickJS un…

I have a small, CPU-intensive benchmark which shows the performance of QuickJS to be comparable to other interpreters written in C. It's on par with MicroPython and recent versions of Ruby, and a little faster than CPython and Lua.

However, it's still 2-3x slower than the optimized, CPU-specific interpreters used in LuaJIT and V8 (with their JITs disabled), and 20-100x slower than the LuaJIT, V8 and PyPy JIT compilers.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#214

Post by schwartzworld »

smt88 wrote: post #181
andrewstuart wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Despite my general distaste for JS largely due to websites tending to abuse it more than anything Why would you have a distaste for JavaScript based on how others use it? JavaScript has evolved into an extremely powerful and flexible language which is taking many great lessons from other languages. Sure its not perfect but its a real workhorse. EDIT: I know you're not meant to ask why the downvotes, but I do wonde…

> Why would you have a distaste for JavaScript based on how others use it? Languages don't exist in a vacuum. The way libraries are written and the way coworkers write code has a huge effect on us. > proven over time its flexibility and adaptability to become probably the single most used language Its usage has nothing to do with its quality. The web has a low barrier to entry, and well web devs have to use JS becaus…

"If JS were so great, we wouldn't have increasing TypeScript adoption or a million compile-to-JS languages."

That's quite the leap. Plenty of people like writing plain JS. Your only argument for why "it sucks" is basically "because some other people made tools that they thought were better." What's one language that doesn't fit that?

Python sucks too https://github.com/vindarel/languages-that-compile-to-python

C sucks too https://github.com/andrei-markeev/ts2c

Rust sucks too http://rusthon.github.io/Rusthon/

The real reason people talk about JS being bad is because "circle jerk" and "reasons".

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#215

Post by schwartzworld »

_pmf_ wrote: post #180
andrewstuart wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Despite my general distaste for JS largely due to websites tending to abuse it more than anything Why would you have a distaste for JavaScript based on how others use it? JavaScript has evolved into an extremely powerful and flexible language which is taking many great lessons from other languages. Sure its not perfect but its a real workhorse. EDIT: I know you're not meant to ask why the downvotes, but I do wonde…

> I stand by these comments - JavaScript is a flawed but great language I like my languages a bit less flawed, thank you very much.

Which languages would those be?

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#216

Post by Accacin »

userbinator wrote: post #182
andrewstuart wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Despite my general distaste for JS largely due to websites tending to abuse it more than anything Why would you have a distaste for JavaScript based on how others use it? JavaScript has evolved into an extremely powerful and flexible language which is taking many great lessons from other languages. Sure its not perfect but its a real workhorse. EDIT: I know you're not meant to ask why the downvotes, but I do wonde…

The amount of JS I come across on sites that is purely superfluous and serves to irritate, manipulate, or simply waste resources far outnumbers the actually useful, efficient, and purposeful use of it in webapps. I'm talking about things like loading several MB of it with half a dozen frameworks and libraries, just to render a few KB of text. Don't even get me started on popups/popunders/popins/clickjacking/scrolljac…

Ok, so this comment is so cliche it's getting hard to ignore. Yes, JavaScript is abused but the problem is that people by large enjoy these types of site.

I've never heard my parents or non-developer friends complain about a site using too much JavaScript, but if I show them Hacker News or old.reddit.com, they'll complain it looks ugly and hard to read/use and really do lose interest in it immediately.

Anyway, I fail to see how this is a problem of JavaScript. Replace JavaScript with any other language in the browser and you'll see exactly the same abuse happen.

If you really dislike JS so much, do what I do and disable JavaScript in the browser. If a site doesn't work I don't use it. People on Hacker News seem to want the web to revolve around themselves but it never has done and never will.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#217

Post by neilv »

a_lieb wrote: post #204
ksec wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

Richard Stallman is mostly known for his activist/politics stuff at this point, but he was also a heck of a developer. He wrote Emacs, GCC, GDB and glibc. I'm not sure if he was a total lone wolf, but my understanding is that in the early days he was overwhelmingly the main person responsible for those projects.

It's hard to get a sense of how smart RMS is, because he seems to be anti-showy about it. But I've seen him talk in different venues, and calibrate how much he says to the venue. I've also seen him ramp up how much detail he goes into, and what kinds of arguments he can make, when someone with a background in some area is challenging him on some point. I can't tell how smart he is, but I suspect that most people talking with him underestimate him.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#219

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

ksec wrote: post #96
tombert wrote: post #25

Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

Rob Pike and Ken Thompson: UNIX, Plan9, UTF-8, Golang.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#220

Post by neilv »

Cybiote wrote: post #150
ksec wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

I get a similar "is this by some kind of super-human intelligence?" feeling reading stuff from Oleg Kiselyov. http://okmij.org/ftp/

Oleg used to post things like this on Usenet: http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/macros.html#dirty-macros
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