JavaScript right on the hardware

#1

Post by chinchang » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 9:51 PM UTC

JavaScript right on the hardware
technical.io

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#2

Post by jevinskie » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:19 PM UTC

Nifty! I presume this is running on a Linux kernel? How much memory does node use? I would think that kernel + JS VM would chew up quite a bit of your 32 MB of RAM.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#3

Post by chinchang » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

jevinskie wrote: post #2

Nifty! I presume this is running on a Linux kernel? How much memory does node use? I would think that kernel + JS VM would chew up quite a bit of your 32 MB of RAM.

There have been many attempts with Node on embedded systems. Nodejs seems to work on as low as 10MiB.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#4

Post by nawitus » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

From the title I expected the CPU to actually run JavaScript, like a certain decades old computer (of which name I can't recall).

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#5

Post by phpnode » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:32 PM UTC

nawitus wrote: post #4

From the title I expected the CPU to actually run JavaScript, like a certain decades old computer (of which name I can't recall).

you probably mean a Lisp Machine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#6

Post by chad_oliver » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:38 PM UTC

This is very cool, but I don't see how it can compete with boards like the BeagleBone Black. The BleagleBone Black is $45 for a 1GHz CPU and 512 MB of memory, yet the access to low-level hardware is just as good.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#7

Post by farnsworth » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:39 PM UTC

Forgive me for not being hip but why try so hard to put JS in new places? It seems to be just an unfortunate historical accident that JS is one of the most popular languages in the world - does anyone actually like it compared to other modern scripting languages? Could we invest in CoffeeScript instead, at the very least?

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#8

Post by tn13 » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:39 PM UTC

This is precisely what I wanted to work with.

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#9

Post by bpodgursky » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:41 PM UTC

farnsworth wrote: post #7

Forgive me for not being hip but why try so hard to put JS in new places? It seems to be just an unfortunate historical accident that JS is one of the most popular languages in the world - does anyone actually like it compared to other modern scripting languages? Could we invest in CoffeeScript instead, at the very least?

When all you know how to use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

Re: JavaScript right on the hardware

#10

Post by adrianpike » Wed, Aug 14, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

farnsworth wrote: post #7

Forgive me for not being hip but why try so hard to put JS in new places? It seems to be just an unfortunate historical accident that JS is one of the most popular languages in the world - does anyone actually like it compared to other modern scripting languages? Could we invest in CoffeeScript instead, at the very least?

I enjoy JS a lot, and will frequently choose it over Ruby or Python. A functional style plays nicely with a lot of the problems I'm solving, it's nearing ubiquity, and there's lots of big names and smart people working on optimizing it even more.

In my day job, we write mostly Coffee - which is little more than a preprocessor to JS, IMHO. It's definitely nice to have, but I don't consider it an independent language unto itself. If you know JS well, it shouldn't take more than a day to get up to speed with CS.