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QuickJS JavaScript Engine

bellard.org

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Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#151
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

Dan Bernstein. Researched curve 25519 and provided reference implementations of x25519 & ed25519. Invented chacha20, such that it never branches on user secrets to minimize side channel leakage. Along with poly1305, these form the foundation of almost all “modern crypto” from Signal to TLS v1.3. He wrote qmail as a superior MTA to the incumbent Sendmail. He’s even beat the US government in court.

And unless there's another software engineer named Daniel J. Bernstein out there, he also authored RFC 1143 documenting the Q Method of TELNET Option Negotiation [1], which prevents negotiation loops and nails down (in the shape of a state machine) exactly what behavior is good and proper for a Telnet peer.

I referenced this document a lot when writing my own Telnet stack.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1143/

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#152
post #96
post #25

Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement.

I have two question in my mind. 1. Are there anyone on HN knows him in real life? 2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg. [1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

John Carmack is the immediate one that comes to mind.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's probably worth $300-$500/hr if not $1k...

Can you really put a number on this level of skill and productivity?

The problem with putting a $ figure on it is that people who create free software create emmense amounts of value but don't capture even a tiny fraction for themselves. OTOH to montize their genius they need to help corporates do things that are not neccesarily great for society. Also a coporate situation may hamper their genius, although at this level he probably gets to call the shots.

Also a lot of useless consultants would earn that much, as would people doing shady shit, as well as many talented people so the $ comparison is kind of insulting.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#154
post #131

I have a potentially dumb question as I'm way out of my element here. What would someone....do with this? Use it to run JS on some embedded device where you can run C?

I have a domain-specific Windows application that uses Google's V8 engine for hosting user-written scripts. It hasn't been upgraded for several years, and when I recently took a look at updating the V8 version it's linked with, I was dismayed at how bloated and complex V8 has become. Seems like it can't be compiled down to a single DLL anymore, at least not without turning the compilation into a miniature research pr…

> Ideally someone would just do an "stb"-style JavaScript interpreter that would fit into a single .c or .h file.

DukTape is already that.

https://duktape.org/index.html

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#155
post #25

Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement.

He's literally a fucking god at this point, we should all bow down to the might of him. Amen

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#159
Wow. The core is a single 1.5MB file that's very readable, it supports nearly all of the latest standard, and Bellard even added his own extensions on top of that. It has compile-time options for either a NaN-boxing or traditional tagged union object representation, so he didn't just go for a single minimal implementation (unlike e.g. OTCC) but even had the time and energy to explore a bit. I like the fact that it's not C99 but appears to be basic C89, meaning very high portability.

Despite my general distaste for JS largely due to websites tending to abuse it more than anything, this project is still immensely impressive and very inspiring, and one wonders whether there is still "space at the bottom" for even smaller but functionality competitive implementations.

Re: QuickJS JavaScript Engine

#160
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Bernstein. Researched curve 25519 and provided reference implementations of x25519 & ed25519. Invented chacha20, such that it never branches on user secrets to minimize side channel leakage. Along with poly1305, these form the foundation of almost all “modern crypto” from Signal to TLS v1.3. He wrote qmail as a superior MTA to the incumbent Sendmail. He’s even beat the US government in court.

And unless there's another software engineer named Daniel J. Bernstein out there, he also authored RFC 1143 documenting the Q Method of TELNET Option Negotiation [1], which prevents negotiation loops and nails down (in the shape of a state machine) exactly what behavior is good and proper for a Telnet peer. I referenced this document a lot when writing my own Telnet stack. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1143…

>…when writing my own Telnet stack.

There’s probably an interesting story hidden in there.

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