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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe claude code uses bellard as agent

Claude is really Bellard sitting in his kitchen, sipping coffee, casually replying to code requests while getting ready for his day.

A sort of reverse code golf where he doesn't care what he sends as all that code will never touch his prod code bases.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#142

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.

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 li…

I agree that there is signal, and that phrasing his original post as you pointed out would have been better.

My issue is that the cost, in terms of time, for these experiments have really gone down with LLMs. Earlier, if someone played around with the posted project, we knew they spent a reasonable amount of time on it, and thus care about the subject. With LLMs, this is not the case.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#143
post #103
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Ah, reading this comment makes your original post 10x more interesting. I guess this is "start with why" in action. :)

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#144
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is! ACM grants several awards for scientists and more. One such award is the Turing Award [1], given "for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

Possibly more relevant is the "ACM Software System Award": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ACM_Software_Syst...

Linux and Torvalds hasn't gotten one?

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#145
post #57

When reading through the projects list of JS restrictions for "stricter" mode, I was expecting to see that it would limit many different JS concepts. But in fact none of the things which are impossible in this subset are things I would do in the course of normal programming anyway. I think all of the JS code I've written over the past few years would work out of the box here.

I was surprised by this one that only showed up lower in the document:

- Date: only Date.now() is supported. [0]

I certainly understand not shipping the js date library especially in an embedded environment both for code-size, and practicality reasons (it's not a great date library), but that would be an issue in many projects (even if you don't use it, libraries yo use almost certainly do.

https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs/blob/main/README.md#:~:t...

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#147

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…

It's funny how many people replying here just got whooshed. This comment is satire; they don't actually think Bellard wrote everything in 12 minutes.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#148

I'm not an embedded systems guy (besides using esp32 boards) so this might be a dumb question but does something like this open up the possibility of programming an esp32/arduino board with Javascript, like Micro/Circuit Python?

That's been possible with Moddable/Kinoma's XS engine, which is standards compliant with ES6 and beyond.

https://www.moddable.com/faq#comparison>

If you take a look at the MicroQuickJS README, you can see that it's not a full implementation of even ES5, and it's incompatible in several ways.

Just being able to run JS also isn't going to automatically give you any bindings for the environment.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#149
post #133

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. http…

Not "never exploit"; Reason and BuckleScript are examples of different "language skins" for OCaml.

The problem with "skins" is that they create variety where people strive for uniformity to lower the cognitive load. OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#150

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.

Does it count as 0-indexing when your 0 is a floating point number?
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