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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#101

Post by billforsternz »

stronglikedan wrote: post #6
alcover wrote: post #5

I wish for this new year we reboot the Web with a super light standard and accompanying ecosystem with - A small and efficient JS subset, HTML, CSS - A family of very simple browsers that do just that - A new Web that adheres to the above That would make my year.

I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.

A few too many 9s there I think. You're estimating that only 1 person in every 10 million could care less. So less than 50 such people in the USA for example

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#102

Post by sunshine-o »

vbezhenar wrote: post #70
stronglikedan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.

My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content. Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should…

I believe this is the way we might get out of this mess.

With a markdown over HTTP browser I could already almost browse Github through the READMEs and probably other websites.

Markdown is really a loved and now quite popular format. It is sad gemini created a separate closed format instead of just adopting it.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#103

Post by simonw »

eichin wrote: post #84
simonw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about the AI bit. Do you think it's interesting that MicroQuickJS can be used from Python via FFI or as a compiled module, and can also be compiled to WebAssembly and called from Node.js and Deno and from Pyodide running in a browser? ... and that it provides a useful sandbox in that you can robustly limit both the memory and time allowed, including limiting expensive regular expression evaluation? I included…

Usually I watch your stuff very closely (and positively) because you're pushing the edges of how LLMs can be useful for code (and are a lot more honest/forthwright than most enthusiasts about it Going Horribly Wrong and how much work you need to do to keep on top of it.) This one... looks like a crossbar of random things that don't seem like things anyone would actually want to do? Mentioning the sandboxing bit in th…

Yeah, I failed completely to explain the context here.

I'm currently on a multi-year side-quest to find safe ways to execute untrusted user-provided code in my Python and web applications.

As such, I pay very close attention to any new language or library that looks like it might be able to provide a robust sandbox.

MicroQuickJS instantly struck me as a strong candidate for that, and initial protoyping has backed that up.

None of that was clear from my original comment.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#104

Post by mtlynch »

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 do that even if you gave me twice as much time.

Okay, but seriously, this is super cool, and I continue to be amazed by Fabrice. I honestly do think it would be interesting to do an analysis of a day or week of Fabrice's commits to see if there's something about his approach that others can apply besides just being a hardworking genius.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#106

Post by zero_bias »

born-jre wrote: post #77
alcover wrote: post #5

I wish for this new year we reboot the Web with a super light standard and accompanying ecosystem with - A small and efficient JS subset, HTML, CSS - A family of very simple browsers that do just that - A new Web that adheres to the above That would make my year.

There could be a way: This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation. - TV screens UI - some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam stor…

It’s called WML/WAP

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#107

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

alabhyajindal wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about the AI bit. Do you think it's interesting that MicroQuickJS can be used from Python via FFI or as a compiled module, and can also be compiled to WebAssembly and called from Node.js and Deno and from Pyodide running in a browser? ... and that it provides a useful sandbox in that you can robustly limit both the memory and time allowed, including limiting expensive regular expression evaluation? I included…

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 by any chance as there are some similarities even if they are both minimalist but overall nice!

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#108

Post by keeganpoppen »

alabhyajindal wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about the AI bit. Do you think it's interesting that MicroQuickJS can be used from Python via FFI or as a compiled module, and can also be compiled to WebAssembly and called from Node.js and Deno and from Pyodide running in a browser? ... and that it provides a useful sandbox in that you can robustly limit both the memory and time allowed, including limiting expensive regular expression evaluation? I included…

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.

but there is signal in what people are inspired to do upon seeing a new project-- why not simply evaluate the interestingness level of these sorts of mashups on their own terms? it actually feels very "hacker"-y to go out and show people possibilities like this. i have no particular comment on how "interesting" the derivative projects are in this case, but i have a feeling if his original post had been framed more like "i think it's super interesting how easy it is to use via FFI on various runtimes X & Y (oh btw in the spirit of full transparency: i used ai to help me. and you can see more details at ). especially because i think everyone who peruses HN with some regularity is likely to know of simon's work in at least some capacity, and i am-- speaking only for myself-- essentially always interested in any sort of project he embarks on, especially his llm-assisted experiments and stuff. but hey-- at the end of the day, all of this value judgment is realized as plainly as possible with +1 / -1 (up- and down-vote) and i guess it just is what it is. if number bad, HN no like. shrug.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#109

Post by didip »

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 real. The GOAT is at it again!

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#110

Post by hsaliak »

vatsachak wrote: post #56
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.

Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards. Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday

peak hacker news comment lol
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