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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#421

Post by a-french-anon »

brabel wrote: post #157
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 feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons. Lua was first released in 1993. I think that it's pretty conventional for the time, though yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's (which were more popular in Brazil at the time than C, which is why that is the case)! Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either? Perl, which i…

I don't think you understand his point. Ruby has a different syntax because it presents different/more language features than a very basic C-like language; it's inspired by Lisp/SmallTalk, after all. Lua doesn't but still decided to change its looks a lot, according to him.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#422

Post by petters »

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…

Lua having a JIT compiler seems like a big difference though. It was a while since that got major updates, but probably relevant at the time?

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#423

Post by IshKebab »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #293
teo_zero wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact zero-based has shown some undeniable advantages over one-based. I couldn't explain it better than Dijkstra's famous essay: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

It's fine, I can see the advantages. I just think it's a weird level of blindness to act like 1 indexing is some sort of aberration. It's really not. It's actually quite friendly for new or casual programmers, for one.

Is there any actual evidence that new programmers really find this hard? Python is renowned for being beginner friendly and I've never heard of anyone suggesting it was remotely a problem.

There are only a few languages that are purely for beginners (LOGO and BASIC?) so it's a high cost to annoy experienced programmers for something that probably isn't a big deal anyway.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#424

Post by mananaysiempre »

IgorPartola wrote: post #352
mananaysiempre wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong in the way in which many people are wrong when they hear about a thing called “tail-call optimization ”, which is why some people have been trying to get away from the term in favour of “proper tail calls” or something similar, at least as far as R5RS[1]: > A Scheme implementation is properly tail-recursive if it supports an unbounded number of active tail calls. The issue here is that, in every language…

I sort of see what you are getting at but I am still a bit confused: If I have a program that based on the input given to it runs some number of recursions of a function and two compilers of the language, can I compile the program using both of them if compiler A has PTC and compiler B does not no matter what the actual program is? As in, is the only difference that you won’t get a runtime error if you exceed the max…

That is correct, the difference is only visible at runtime. So is the difference between garbage collection (whether tracing or reference counting) and lack thereof: you can write a long-lived C program that calls malloc() throughout its lifetime but never free(), but you’re not going to have a good time executing it. Unless you compile it with Fil-C, in which case it will work (modulo the usual caveats regarding syntactic vs semantic garbage).

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#425

Post by mananaysiempre »

Zacharias030 wrote: post #396
IgorPartola wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of see what you are getting at but I am still a bit confused: If I have a program that based on the input given to it runs some number of recursions of a function and two compilers of the language, can I compile the program using both of them if compiler A has PTC and compiler B does not no matter what the actual program is? As in, is the only difference that you won’t get a runtime error if you exceed the max…

I think features of the language can make it much easier (read: possible) for the compiler to recognize when a function is tail call optimizable. Not every recursion will be, so it matters greatly what the actual program is.

It is a feature of the language (with proper tail calls) that a certain class of calls defined in the spec must be TCOd, if you want to put things that way. It’s not just that it’s easier for the compiler to recognize them, it’s that it has to.

(The usual caveats about TCO randomly not working are due to constraints imposed by preexisting ABIs or VMs; if you don’t need to care about those, then the whole thing is quite straightforward.)

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#426

Post by exasperaited »

anthk wrote: post #413
exasperaited wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WML/WAP got a bad rap I think, largely because of the way it was developed and imposed/introduced. But it was not insane, and it represented a clarity of thought that then went missing for decades. Several things that were in WML are quite reminiscent of interactions designed in web components today.

Gopher today (and even more Gemini) can do almost anything Wap did but without being a dead platform.

Have you read the WML 1.x spec? Let alone WML 2.x which never really happened. It had much more interesting scope than Gemini does.

Gemini is not a good or sensible design. It's reactionary more than it is informed.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#428

Post by junon »

silisili wrote: post #391
junon wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I dislike about Lua is the 1-indexing. I know they had reasons for it but it always caused issues.

I'm torn on this. Initially I agreed, just because so many other languages do it that way. But if you ignore that and clean slate it, IMO, 1 based makes more sense. I feel like 0 based mainly gained foothold because of C's bastardization of arrays vs pointers and associated tricks. But most other languages don't even support that. You can only see :len(x)-1 so many times before you realize how ridiculous it is.

0 based has a LOT of benefits whereas the reasoning, if I recall, for 1-indexing in Lua was to make the language more approachable to non-devs.

Having written a game in it (via LÖVE), the 1-indexing was a continued source of problems. On the other hand, I rarely need to use len-1, especially since most languages expose more readable methods such as `last()`.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#429

Post by zipy124 »

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.

People only deny the existence of such people based on their own ego, believing that no one could possibly be worth 10x more or produce 10x more than they can. Those who have seen those people know full well these people exist.

It's kind of crazy it ever became some accepted world view, given how every field has a 10xer that is rather famous for it, whether it be someone who dominates in sport, an academic like Paul Erdős or Euler, a programmer like Fabrice or Linus Torvalds, a leader like Napoleon , or any number of famous inventors throughout history.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#430

Post by jacobs101 »

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…

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