341–350 of 594 posts
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And if you find you need more features than that - just build an app, don't make the web browser into some overly bloated app!
Then you have to deal with os compatibility. That's the main selling point of the Web, it works everywhere.
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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...
Fabrice is an absolute legend. Most people would be content with just making QEMU, but this guy makes TinyC and FFmpeg and QuickJS and MicroQuickJS and a bunch of other huge projects. I am envious that I will never anywhere near his level of productivity.
I forgot about FFmpeg (thanks for the reminder), but my first thought was "yup that makes perfect sense".
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I don't think you're wrong per se. This is a "correct" way of thinking of the situation, but it's not the only correct way and it's arguably not the most useful. A more useful way to understand the situation is that a language's major implementations are more important than the language itself. If the spec of the language says something, but nobody implements it, you can't write code against the spec. And on the flip…
Are you saying that Lua's TCO is an accidental feature due to the first implementation having it? How accurate is that?
I'm saying it isn't very useful argue about whether a feature is a feature of the language or a feature of the implementation, because the language is pretty useless independent of its implementation(s).
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If the language spec requires TCO, I think you can reasonably call it part of the language.
It wouldn't be the first time the specs have gone too far and beyond their perimeter. C's "register" variables used to have the same issue, and even "inline" has been downgraded to a mere hint for the compiler (which can ignore it and still be a C compiler).
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Yeah QuickJS is great. I bet MQJS will also be very popular. Quite impressive that bro is going to have two JS engines to brag about in addition to a lot of other very useful things!
> Quite impressive... Yes, quite! Monsieur Bellard is a legend of computer programming. It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB. Unfortunate that he doesn't seem to write publicly about how he thinks about software. I've never seen him as a guest on any podcast either. I have long wondered who the "Charlie Gordon" who seems to collaborate with him on everyt…
I am of the firm belief that "Monsieur Fabrice Bellard" is not one person but a group of programmers writing under this nom de plume like "Nicolas Bourbaki" was in Mathematics ;-)
I don't know of any other programmer who has similar breadth and depth in so many varied domains. Just look at his website - https://bellard.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard No self-aggrandizing stuff etc. but only tech. He is an ideal for all of us to strive for.
Watson's comment on how Sherlock Holmes made him feel can be rephrased in this context as;
"I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours [i.e. fellow programmers], but I was [and am] always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with [the works of Fabrice Bellard]."
PS: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer - https://web.archive.org/web/20210128085300/https://smartbear...
PPS: Fabrice Bellard: A Computer Science Pioneer - https://www.scribd.com/document/511765517/Fabrice-Bellard-In... (pretty good long article)
If anyone wants to try out MicroQuickJS in a browser here's a simple playground interface for executing a WebAssembly compiled version of it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs It's a variant of my QuickJS playground here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs The QuickJS page loads 2.28 MB (675 KB transferred). The MicroQuickJS one loads 303 KB (120 KB transferred).
I was interested to try Date.now() since this is mentioned as being the only part of the Date implementation that is supported but was surprised to find it always returns 0 for your microquickjs version - your quickjs variant appears to return the current unix time.
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Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards. Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday
Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language. The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who…
It's unfortunate that he uploaded this without notable commit history, it would be interesting to see how long it takes a programmer of his caliber to bring up a project like this. That said, judging by the license file this was based on QuickJS anyway, making it a moot comparison.
It does say "public repository of..." implying there's a non-public one with real history. Not sure why not upload the main one though.
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> Quite impressive... Yes, quite! Monsieur Bellard is a legend of computer programming. It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB. Unfortunate that he doesn't seem to write publicly about how he thinks about software. I've never seen him as a guest on any podcast either. I have long wondered who the "Charlie Gordon" who seems to collaborate with him on everyt…
> It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB. Not many, but these do come to mind: Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Rob Pike. But yeah, it’s rarefied air up there.
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 feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons. Lua was first released in 1993. I think that it's pretty conventional for the time, though yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's (which were more popular in Brazil at the time than C, which is why that is the case)! Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either? Perl, which i…
def ruby(is)
it = is
a = "bad"
example()
begin
it["had"] = pascal(:like)
rescue
flow
end
end