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JavaScript right on the hardware

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Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#171

Post by cpeterso »

eob wrote: post #28

First off, this is cool. It is tremendously exciting to see the bar for hardware hacking getting lower and lower. To the people complaining "Why JS? C is fine!", remember that once the complaint was "Why C? ASM is fine!". At the same time, I can't help but grin that we on the CS side find a way to erase all the gains in performance and efficiency as soon as the EE guys make them. There has to be come kind of universa…

The joke I've heard is that software is a gas and expands to fill the available space.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#172

Post by smilekzs »

tn13 wrote: post #150
Tichy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prefer C over JavaScript? Header files? Pointer arithmetic hell? Precompiler Macros? Manual Memory Management? Seriously? To each their own, though.

C rules the embedded systems world. By embedded system I refer to the serious applications such as automotive systems and so on and not some funky new toy project done using Arduino. There are some very good reasons why C can not be replaced by any other programming language when it comes to safety critical embedded systems. That is what separates men from boys.

As long as you write C correctly, which can be verbose when things get complex.

This project seems to be less concerned with the realtime aspect and more concerned with wiring things together. To me it functions as an OpenWRT/RasPi hybrid, with the Node runtime.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#174

Post by coreyja »

14113 wrote: post #156
coreyja wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why it worries you? Honestly just curious. Is it the performance hits of more levels of abstraction? Or fear of all data being in the "cloud"?

Personally it worries me because people can build whatever they want and call themselves "programmers". It encourages a state in the industry when knowing about data structures, hardware, turing machines or the other fundamentals of computer science are considered unecessary. Perhaps they are, from a business standpoint. However, it will eventually inhibit growth of the discipline as a whole. A common rebuttal to tha…

I understand where you are coming from, and I don't like the "it allows people to get into programming more easily" excuse either.

But I don't really think it will inhibit growth. I think that it is more likely just to create two main groups of people that call themselves programmers. The people that know HTML and jQuery and the actual programmers. I don't think it will do anything to the growth of real programming, it just might mean we get lots of people calling themselves programmers who really aren't. But that happens already.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#175

Post by test-it »

tambourine_man wrote: post #159

180mhz ARM Cortex-M3 LPC1830 32mb SDRAM I'm amazed that such wimpy hardware can run modern JS satisfactorily.

It won't run satisfactory.

Reminds me of that time Sun made the Java CPU and the JavaStation. A hardware implementation of the JVM. It ran 20 times slower than the Microsoft JVM on an average Windows PC.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#176

Post by Sealy »

That looks very very cool. Im really excited to see how this will change the game.

I just wanted to ask the readers here... anybody notice the sticky tape holding it together in the second picture?

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#177

Post by timmyelliot »

fsniper wrote: post #114
benihana wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone* knows JavaScript. I'd wager that the vast majority of professional software engineers work on the web, or very close to the web, and JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. I mean just look at the front page of Hacker News on any given week. It's full of talk of JavaScript and new JavaScript libraries and new things to do in JavaScript. When you think about how many more people this can reach wi…

Everybody thinks they know javascript, but on the contrary nobody actually knows it. It's a very twisted and powerful language. It has many quirks and many unknowns. Most of the time if one thinks s/he knows javascript, actually s/he knows a higher level abstraction library and DOM built on javascript like Jquery.

Yeah, but a basic level of javascript is often all that's necessary.

I had quite a few non-developers on my team, who knew enough javascript to have a "good enough" idea what was going on with the code, without having to bug me all the time.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#178

Post by diydsp »

mistercow wrote: post #131

Hmm, I can see some potential difficulties with making JS work efficiently on that MC. It only has single precision floating point instructions, for one thing, and I can't tell how many cycles those instructions take. I'm guessing they'll just do a variant of JS that uses single precision, but even so, it seems like it would be hard to squeeze any kind of performance out of it.

I took a brief glance at the LPC1830 and it seems it doesn't have hardware floating-point at all. (None of the mainstream Cortex M3 products that I've seen do). Do you have better info on this?

So, I believe its FP support is through software and could be written to be double or greater precision. If this is true and if JS can only do floats, it would be bad news for many basic mathematical operations running on this chip. But hey, as someone pointed out above:

People don't want performance. They want libraries.

But with no FPU, count me out. I'd rather have my stm32f4. Just sayin'.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#179

Post by TheZenPsycho »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #121
coreyja wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic, but is it just me or has Lua gotten a lot of attention on HN in the past weekish? I haven't heard much of Lua before but recently it seems to have come up a lot more. And even more off topic (sorry), what makes Lua better/different than other scripting languages? EDIT: On jacobwcarlson suggestion, I Googled Lua vs Python, and found this Wiki, http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusPython Not a speed c…

Lua is a language designed to be embeddable, Javascript is a language that didn't even had the chance to be properly designed. Although I'm one of those Lua "unadopters", for me it's better to simplify stuff to my audience, and I have considered seriously to use JavaScript for my next project instead of Lua.

Both javascript and lua were designed for very similar goals. It just so happens that the designers of Lua had more time to do it- plus they aren't burdened with the need to always be backwards compatible, so lua (now at version 5) breaks scripts written for older versions.

So they each have their trade offs.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#180

Post by timmyelliot »

blackhole wrote: post #123
benihana wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone* knows JavaScript. I'd wager that the vast majority of professional software engineers work on the web, or very close to the web, and JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. I mean just look at the front page of Hacker News on any given week. It's full of talk of JavaScript and new JavaScript libraries and new things to do in JavaScript. When you think about how many more people this can reach wi…

I may know javascript, but my god I wish I didn't have to.

I agree. I sort of like javascript now, but it was an acquired taste after force-feeding myself the language.
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