This is a hell of a Christmas present, Mr. Santa Bellard!
Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
291–300 of 594 posts
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there not a way to use the browser native js execution environment for that? You lose a non-trivial amount of performance running js inside quickjs inside of wasm vs the browser native js engine. I wouldn't be surprised if that's 10 or even 20 times slower, and of course requires loading more code into the browser (slower startup, more ram usage). Maybe you don't care about that, but all of that is pretty orthogon…
Maybe with plugins. The WebAssembly way is cross platform. You would be very surprised with the performances of WebAssembly. I have built a Fibonacci test program in Rust that runs faster when built to Wasi than the native target on my MacBook
This is because the execution is very predictable, so the JIT in the runtime can emit optimized code with the knowledge of how the code is going to run. Embedding unpredictable code (like a javascript interpreter) typically has substantially worse performance when executing under a JIT. This is in addition to the fact that Quickjs (despite being pretty good) can't match the performance of sophisticated JIT implementations like V8 or JavaScriptCore
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pascal. Modula-2. BASIC. Hell, Logo. Lately, yes, Julia and R. Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly. I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed…
In fact zero-based has shown some undeniable advantages over one-based. I couldn't explain it better than Dijkstra's famous essay: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
It's fine, I can see the advantages. I just think it's a weird level of blindness to act like 1 indexing is some sort of aberration. It's really not. It's actually quite friendly for new or casual programmers, for one.
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN. If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you'r…
I'm determined to normalize linking to one's own writing, provided it's relevant to the conversation.
I think you're misreading what the "normalization" problem actually is and why my comment got a lot of upvotes.
You're not pushing against an arbitrary taboo where people dislike self links in principle. People already accept self links on HN when they're occasional and clearly relevant. What people are reacting to is the pattern when "my answer is a link to my site" becomes your default state, it stops reading like helpful reference and starts reading like your distribution strategy.
And that's why "I'm determined to normalize it" probably won't work because you can't normalize your way out of other people's experience of friction. If your behavior reliably adds a speed bump to reading threads forcing people to context switch/click out and wonder if they're being marketed to then the community will develop a shortcut I mentioned in my previous comment which basically is : this is self promo so just ignore.
If your goal is genuinely to share useful ideas, you're better off meeting people where they are: put the relevant 2-6 sentences directly in the comment, and then add something like "I wrote more about it on my blog" or whatever and if anyone is interested they will scroll through your blog (you have it in your profile so anyone can find it with one click) or ask for a link.
Otherwise you're not "normalizing" anything, you're training readers to stop paying attention to you. And I assure you once that happens, it's hard to undo, because people won't relitigate your intent every time. They'll just scroll. It's a process that's already started, but you can still reverse it.
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
One day Brython (python with braces allowing copy paste code to autoindent) will be well supported by LSPs and world peace will ensure
SyntaxError: not a chanceRe: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#296People 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…
That doesn't mean anything. I quite often start with writing a proof-of-concept, and only initialize the git repository when I'm confident the POC will actually lead to something useful. Common sense says that those files already existed at the time of the first commit.
When you code with butterflies, you code at the speed of flight.
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#297Fabrice 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 all the praise he's receiving, I think his web design skills have gone overlooked. bellard.org is fast, responsive and presents information clearly. Actually I think the fancier the website, the shittier the software. Examples: Tarsnap - minimal website, brilliant software. Discord - Whitespacey, animation-heavy abomination of a website. Software: hundreds of MB of JS slop, government wiretap+botnet for degenerat…
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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#298Fabrice 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.
At this point I'm convinced that they're not a 'real person' and the 'Fabrice' is an operational code name for a very mature hacker collective.
Real people have to sleep at some point!
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s called WML/WAP
I think we can do better than a 15x15 text window
WML/WAP got a bad rap I think, largely because of the way it was developed and imposed/introduced.
But it was not insane, and it represented a clarity of thought that then went missing for decades. Several things that were in WML are quite reminiscent of interactions designed in web components today.
Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
#300Interesting. I wonder if mqjs would make it feasible to massively parallelize JavaScript on the GPU. I’m looking for a way to run thousands of simultaneous JS interpreters, each with an isolated heap and some shared memory. There are some research projects [1, 2] in this direction, but they are fairly experimental.