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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#221

Post by procaryote »

lioeters wrote: post #184
spacechild1 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons. Lua is a pretty old language. In 1993 the world had not really settled on C style syntax. Compared to Perl or Tcl, Lua's syntax seems rather conventional. Some design decisions might be a bit unusual, but overall the language feels very consistent and predictable. JS is a mess in comparison. > because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax Huh?…

> consistent and predictable That's what matters to me, not how similar Lua is to other languages, but that the language is well-designed in its own system of rules and conventions. It makes sense, every part of it contributes to a harmonious whole. JavaScript on the other hand. When speaking of Algol or C-style syntax, it makes me imagine a "Common C" syntax, like taking the best, or the least common denominator, of…

Is modern C really much more complicated than old C? C++ is a mess of course.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#222

Post by alex_suzuki »

simonw wrote: post #67
simonw wrote: post #17

Clarification added later : One of my key interests at the moment is finding ways to run untrusted code from users (or generated by LLMs) in a robust sandbox from a Python application. MicroQuickJS looked like a very strong contender on that front, so I fired up Claude Code to try that out and build some prototypes. I had Claude Code for web figure out how to run this in a bunch of different ways this morning - I hav…

Down to -4. Is this generic LLM-dislike, or a reaction to perceived over-self-promotion, or something else? No matter how much you hate LLM stuff I think it's useful to know that there's a working proof of concept of this library compiled to WASM and working as a Python library. I didn't plan to share this on HN but then MicroQuickJS showed up on the homepage so I figured people might find it useful. (If I hadn't dis…

I think the people interacting with this post are just more likely to appreciate the raw craftsmanship and talent of an individual like Bellard, and coincidentally might be more critical of the machinery that in their perception devalues it. I count myself among them, but didn’t downvote, as I generally think your content is of high quality.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#224

Post by attractivechaos »

rossant wrote: post #134
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone says there's no such thing as a 10x programmer, I point them to Fabrice and they usually change their mind.

Perhaps closer to 100x actually.

You can call 1000 averaged programmers and see if they can write MicroQuickJS using the same amount of time, or call one averaged programmer and see if he/she can write MicroQuickJS to the same quality in his/her life time. 10X, 100X or 1000X measures the productivity of us mortals, not someone like Fabrice Bellard.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#225

Post by ZiiS »

xonix wrote: post #208
norir wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't love a good deal of Lua's syntax, but I do think the authors had good reasons for their choices and have generally explained them. Even if you disagree, I think "without good reasons" is overly dismissive. Personally though, I think the distinctive choices are a boon. You are never confused about what language you are writing because Lua code is so obviously Lua. There is value in this. Once you have written…

Re: TCO Does the language give any guarantee that TCO was applied? In other words can it give you an error that the recursion is not of tail call form? Because I imagine a probability of writing a recursion and relying on it being TCO-optimized, where it's not. I would prefer if a language had some form of explicit TCO modifier for a function. Is there any language that has this?

At least in Lua then the rule is simply 'last thing a function dose' this is unambiguous. `return f()` is always a tail call and `return f() + 1` never is.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#226

Post by MobiusHorizons »

simonw wrote: post #173
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the purpose of compiling this to web assembly? What web assembly runtimes are there where there is not already an easily accessible (substantially faster) js execution environment? I know wasmtime exists and is not tied to a js execution engine like basically every other web assembly implementation, but the uses of wasmtime are not restricted from dependencies like v8 or jsc. Usually web assembly is used for…

I want to build features - both client- and server-side - where users can provide JavaScript code that I then execute safely. Just having a WebAssembly engine available isn't enough for this - something has to take that user-provided string of JavaScript and execute it within a safe sandbox. Generally that means you need a JavaScript interpreter that has itself been compiled to WebAssembly. I've experimented with Qui…

This is generally the purpose of JavaScript execution environments like v8 or jsc (or quickjs although I understand not trusting that as a sandbox to the same degree). They are specifically intended for executing untrusted scripts (eg web browsers). Web assembly’s sandboxing comes from js sandboxing, since it was originally a feature of the same programs for the same reasons. Wrapping one sandbox in another is what I’m surprised by.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#227

Post by vatsachak »

hsaliak wrote: post #110
vatsachak wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've only been here for a month. I guess I'm learning well

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#228

Post by arendtio »

ea016 wrote: post #81

Well, as Jeff Atwood famously said [0], "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript". I guess that applies to embedded systems too [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Atwood

Well, wasn't Fabrice Bellard the guy who built a virtual machine with JS so that you could run Linux within the browser?

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33...

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#229

Post by foobarchu »

duped wrote: post #18
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 think there needs to be a split between the web browser as a document renderer and link follower, and the web browser as a portable target for GUI applications. But frankly my biggest gripe is that you need HTML, JS, and CSS. Three distinct languages that are extremely dissimilar in syntax and semantics that you need all three of (or some bastard cross compiler for your JSX to convert from one format to them). Just…

I think this is the ideal direction mainly because a lot of the webs current tech problems stem from websites that don't need app-level features using them. I was in web dev at the advent of SPA-style navigation and understand why everyone switched to it, but at the same time I feel like it's the source of many if not most bugs an performance issues that frustrate the average user.
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