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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#361

Post by s3graham »

vegabook wrote: post #304
antirez wrote: post #111

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…

Lua has been a wild success considering it was born in Brazil, and not some high wealth, network-effected country with all its consequent influential muscle (Ruby? Python? C? Rust? Prolog? Pascal? APL? Ocaml? Show me which one broke out that wasn't "born in the G7"). We should celebrate its plucky success which punches waaay above its adoption weight. It didn't blindly lockstep ALGOL citing "adooooption!!", but didn'…

I appreciate your point, but Python was invented in .nl which wouldn't be G7 strictly speaking.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#362

Post by lioeters »

rramadass wrote: post #345
alexdowad wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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://bel…

The last link has more info than I've seen elsewhere. Here's an altenative link with PDF download. https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#363

Post by somat »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #358
lucketone wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't need to fight over it, because it's a local display preference This has limits. Files produced with tab=2 and others with tab=8, might have quite different result regarding nesting. (pain is still on the menu)

I don't see why? Your window width will presumably be tailored to accommodate common scenarios in your preferred tab width. More than that, in the general case for common C like languages things should almost never be nested more than a few levels deep. That's usually a sign of poorly designed and difficult to maintain code. Lisps are a notable exception here, but due to limitations (arguably poor design) with how th…

I find it tends to be a structural thing, Tabs for indenting are fine, hell I prefer tabs for indenting. But use tabs for spacing and columnar layout and the format tends to break on tab width changes. Honestly not a huge deal but as such I tend to avoid tabs for layout work.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#364

Post by achierius »

jacobp100 wrote: post #138
pizlonator wrote: post #46

This engine restricts JS in all of the ways I wished I could restrict the language back when I was working on JSC. You can’t restrict JS that way on the web because of compatibility. But I totally buy that restricting it this way for embedded systems will result in something that sparks joy

Since you’re on the topic, what ever happened to the multi threading stuff you were doing on JSC? Did it stop when you left Apple? Is the code still in JSC or did it get taken out?

Which multi-threading are you talking about?

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#365

Post by [deleted] »

IgorPartola wrote: post #352
mananaysiempre wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong in the way in which many people are wrong when they hear about a thing called “tail-call optimization ”, which is why some people have been trying to get away from the term in favour of “proper tail calls” or something similar, at least as far as R5RS[1]: > A Scheme implementation is properly tail-recursive if it supports an unbounded number of active tail calls. The issue here is that, in every language…

I sort of see what you are getting at but I am still a bit confused: If I have a program that based on the input given to it runs some number of recursions of a function and two compilers of the language, can I compile the program using both of them if compiler A has PTC and compiler B does not no matter what the actual program is? As in, is the only difference that you won’t get a runtime error if you exceed the max…

[deleted]

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#366

Post by TheTaytay »

lossolo wrote: post #334
simonw wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm determined to normalize it. I would like a LOT more people to have personal websites where they write at length about things, and then share links to what they have already written where it is relevant to the conversation. I'm actively pushing back against the "don't promote your site, don't link to it, restate your content in the comments instead" thing. I am willing to take on risk to my personal reputation…

Well, that's your choice. You can do whatever you want with your reputation, but you can't change human nature and that's essentially what you're trying to do. People don't want HN to turn into another LinkedIn style feed full of AI slop, spam and self promotion. That's exactly what your attempt to "normalize" this behavior would encourage (and I'm confident it won't catch on, sorry). If everyone starts dropping thei…

This is simonw though. I look forward to his thoughts on a topic and would find it annoying if he was forced to summarize his research in a HN thread and then not link to it.

The difference between LinkedIn slop and good content is not the presence or absence of a link to one’s own writing, but the substance and quality of the writing.

If simonw followed these rules you want him to follow, he would be forced to make obscure references to a blog post that I would then need to Google or hope that his blog post surfaces on HN in the next few days. It seems terribly inefficient.

I agree with you that self-promotion is off-putting, and when people post their competing project on a Show HN post, I don’t click those links. But it’s not because they are linking to something they wrote. It’s because they are engaged in “self-promotion”, usually in an attempt to ride someone else’s coattails or directly compete.

If simonw plugged datasette every chance he got, I’d be rolling my eyes too, but linking to his related experiments and demos isn’t that.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#367

Post by pests »

dcminter wrote: post #54
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.

While we're wishing, can we split CSS into two parts - styling and layout? Also, I'd like to fix the spelling on the "referer" header...

why does it need to be two languages? why not style.css and layout.css and you self-maintain the distinction

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#368

Post by TheTaytay »

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 was hoping you experimented with this! I am right there with you, hoping for an easier wasm sandbox for LLMs.

(Keep posting please. Downvotes due to mentioning LLMs will be perceived as a quaint historic artifact in the not so distant future…)

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#369

Post by MobiusHorizons »

simonw wrote: post #284
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? I have not personally used these libraries, but a cursory google search reveals several options: - cloudflare/STPyV8: [0] From cloudflare, intended for executing untrusted code. - Pythonmonkey: [1] Embeds spidermonkey. Not clearly security focused, but sandboxing untrusted code is literally the point of browser js engines. It's a little less clear how you would do this from node, but the v8 embedding in…

... whoa, I don't know how I missed it but I hadn't seen STPyV8 before. I'd seen PyV8 and ruled it out as very unmaintained. One of my requirements for a sandbox is that it needs to me maintained by a team of professionals who are running a multi-million dollar business on it. Cloudflare certainly count! I wonder what they use STPyV8 for themselves? ... on closer inspection it doesn't seem to have the feature I care…

I’m sure you are aware the sandbox that requires maintaining is v8 itself. Of course there are ways for the wrapper to break the sandbox by providing too much in thr global context, but short of that, which the application code could easily do as well, I don’t see why a wrapper should require significant resources to maintain beyond consuming regular updates from upstream. Is there some other reason you hold such a high bar for what is basically just python glue code for the underlying v8 embed api?

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#370

Post by fullstackchris »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #268
ddtaylor wrote: post #50

Fabrice 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.

Always interesting when people as talented as Bellard manage to (apparently) never write a "full-on" GUI-fronted application, or more specifically, a program that sits between a user with constantly shifting goals and workflows and a "core" that can get the job done. I would not want to dismiss or diminish by any amount the incredible work he has done. It's just interesting to me that the problems he appears to pick…

Reading some of these comments, it's clear very few in here have ever written a productive customer facing full stack app "javascript is really good for a single file app!!!" ok, maybe if you're rendering static HTML... -> these are not serious people
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