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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#131

Post by MobiusHorizons »

baudaux wrote: post #125
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what practical purpose you could have for running a js execution engine in an environment that already contains a (substantially faster) js execution engine? Is it just for the joy of doing it (if so good for you, absolutely nothing wrong with that).

It allows, for example, to create bindings as I did for raylib graphics library. exaequOS can run any program that can be built to WebAssembly It will soon support WASI p1 and p2. So many programming languages will be possible for creating programs targeting exaequOS

Is there not a way to use the browser native js execution environment for that? You lose a non-trivial amount of performance running js inside quickjs inside of wasm vs the browser native js engine. I wouldn't be surprised if that's 10 or even 20 times slower, and of course requires loading more code into the browser (slower startup, more ram usage). Maybe you don't care about that, but all of that is pretty orthogonal to the environments I an embedded engine like this is intended for.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#132

Post by andoando »

mtlynch wrote: post #104

People talk about how productive Fabrice Bellard is, but I don't think anyone appreciates just how productive he is. Here's the commit history for this project b700a4d (2025-12-22T1420) - Creates an empty project with an MIT license 295a36b (2025-12-22T1432) - Implements the JavaScript engine, the C API, the REPL, and all documentation He went from zero to a complete JS implementation in just 12 minutes ! I couldn't…

Doesn't say much. Probably had it largely written down and put it together. I don't think it'd even be humanely possible to do that in 12 minutes.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#133

Post by cxr »

antirez wrote: post #111

If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcom…

It wouldn't fix the issue of semantics, but "language skins"[1][2] are an underexplored area of programming language development.

People go through all this effort to separate parsing and lexing, but never exploit the ability to just plug in a different lexer that allows for e.g. "{" and "}" tokens instead of "then" and "end", or vice versa.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&prefix=true&query=cxr%2...>

2. https://old.reddit.com/r/Oberon/comments/1pcmw8n/is_this_sac...>

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#134

Post by rossant »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #90
ddtaylor wrote: post #50

Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive: - FFmpeg: https://bellard.org - QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/ - JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ - TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/ - QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/ Legendary.

Whenever someone says there's no such thing as a 10x programmer, I point them to Fabrice and they usually change their mind.

Perhaps closer to 100x actually.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#135

Post by lossolo »

simonw wrote: post #98
claar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many subscribe to this philosophy: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-... Your github research/ links are an interesting case of this. On one hand, late AI adopters may appreciate your example prompts and outputs. But it feels like trivially reproducible noise to expert LLM users, especially if they are unaware of your reputation for substantive work. The HN AI pushback then drowns ou…

Yeah, I agree that it's rude to show AI output to people... in most cases (and 100% if you don't disclose it.) My simonw/research GitHub repo is deliberately separate from everything else I do because it's entirely AI-generated. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/async-code-research/#th... This particular case is a very solid use-case for that approach though. There are a ton of important q…

And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN.

If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you're doing. Every day you're irritating more people with this behavior, and eventually the substance won't matter to them anymore, so you're acting against your own interests.

Unless you want people to develop the same kind of ad blindness mechanism, where they automatically skip anything that looks like self promotion. Some people will just see a comment by simonw and do the same.

A lot of people have told you this in many threads, but it seems you still don’t get it.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#136

Post by KomoD »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #107
alabhyajindal wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting but I don't think it belongs as a comment under this post. I can use LLMs to create something tangential for each project posted on HN, and so can everyone else. If we all started doing this then the comment section will quickly become useless and not on point.

Offtopic but I went to your website and saw that you created hackernews-mute and recently I was commenting about how one must have created such an extension and ranted about it. So kudos for you to have created it earlier on. Maybe we HN users have minds in sync :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359396#46359695 Have a nice day! Awesome stuff, would keep an eye on your blog, Does your blog/website use mataroa…

I have something like that but as a userscript and with a toggle, it works pretty well for my needs.

Maybe someone finds it useful: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/rD6Dz7hN2V/

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#137

Post by IshKebab »

antirez wrote: post #111

If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcom…

Not to mention the 1-based indexing sin. JavaScript has a lot of WTFs but they got that right at least.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#138

Post by jacobp100 »

pizlonator wrote: post #46

This engine restricts JS in all of the ways I wished I could restrict the language back when I was working on JSC. You can’t restrict JS that way on the web because of compatibility. But I totally buy that restricting it this way for embedded systems will result in something that sparks joy

Since you’re on the topic, what ever happened to the multi threading stuff you were doing on JSC? Did it stop when you left Apple? Is the code still in JSC or did it get taken out?

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#139

Post by pjc50 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #75
ddtaylor wrote: post #50

Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive: - FFmpeg: https://bellard.org - QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/ - JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ - TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/ - QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/ Legendary.

For all the praise he gets here, few seem interested in his methods: writing complete programs, based on robust computer science, with minimal dependencies and tooling.

This is like Feynman's method for solving hard scientific problems: write down the question, think very hard, write down the answer.

It doesn't necessarily translate to people who are less brilliant.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#140

Post by rweichler »

antirez wrote: post #111

If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcom…

I read this comment, about to snap back with an anecdote how I as a 13 year old was able to learn Lua quite easily, and then I stopped myself because that wasn't productive, then pondered what antirez might think of this comment, and then I realized that antirez wrote it.
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