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Proposal: JavaScript Structs

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Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#51

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #44
leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

This is why always say the true beginner programming language is C. Stupid easy to learn, have some loops, have some conditions, make some memory allocations. You will learn about the fundamentals of computing as well, which you might as well ignore (unknowingly) if you start with something like JavaScript (where is this data living in my computer?).

How can you teach C when there's no list of UB, there's sometimes no agreement on how to read the standard, and loads of non-standard-compliant compilers.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#52

Post by pier25 »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

> or more performant

Obviously then can't make TS more performant (since it doesn't execute) but C# is very performant and even surpasses Go in the TechEmpower benchmarks.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#53

Post by egnehots »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

Try Go. Go is really stable as a language and have a very small core feature set.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#54

Post by dgellow »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

Do you have examples of unreadable C#? The language didn’t change much IMHO. You have new features, like records, but C# code looks pretty much like what I started with in 2009

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#55

Post by pier25 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #6

JS devs - do everything but write in another language challenge level: Impossible.

There's a lot of that, certainly, but there are legitimate reason to use JS/TS.

Frontend is an obvious one but also using services like CF Workers or Deno Deploy which are optimized for V8. You're going to get better uptime and lower latency than anything else at that cost.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#56

Post by anon7000 »

throw49sjwo1 wrote: post #24
leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

> And nobody uses most of it! Everybody who does Express, React, or any other popular advanced libraries with TypeScript is using these features. Some things are simply more useful to libraries than line of business code - that's fine. The line of business code is much better thanks to it.

For sure! In a basic API endpoint, I don’t need advanced typescript features.

But if I’m writing a module that a lot of other consumers in the codebase will use, and I want to make their lives easy, I might use a lot of advanced TS features to make sure than type safety & inference works perfectly within the module. Whoever consumes it can then rely on that safety, but also the convenience. The module could have some convoluted types just to provide really clean and correct auto-complete in a certain method. But most people don’t need to worry about how that works

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#57

Post by seanw444 »

pjmlp wrote: post #21
leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

C23 has just been ratified, and C2y has already quite a few proposals. Programming languages are like any other software product, evolution or stagnation. Eventually they might implode, however whatever comes after will follow the same cycle yet again.

And branches [1] of C are still spawning and gaining traction, because C++ is perceived as overkill.

[1]: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#58

Post by rty32 »

tantalor wrote: post #48
szastamasta wrote: post #41

Please stop. What a nonsense. JS is a dynamic language where everything is a Hashtable. It will never be really fast as your structs won’t be in single cacheline, you won’t be able to calculate field address during compile time by pointer offsets. There’s no simd, no multithreading, no real arrays. JS is such a simple, dynamic language. It should just stay this way. Please stop bloating it with every feature that’s t…

High performance applications are already being written that depend on features like shared memory, but because the language has poor support for them then developers have to use ugly workarounds. This proposal solves that with built-in support. >It should just stay this way Counterpoint: JS has been evolving significantly, look at ES6 and ES8 in particular if you need help finding examples.

Exactly. Without new features and syntaxes people would still be doing MyClass.prototype.method = function () { } like idiots. Such a meaningless argument for preventing progress.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#59

Post by leetharris »

pier25 wrote: post #52
leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

> or more performant Obviously then can't make TS more performant (since it doesn't execute) but C# is very performant and even surpasses Go in the TechEmpower benchmarks.

Absolutely. I love C# and .NET, they are incredible and very fast. I just meant to say that they aren't only focused on performance, but also focused on new features.

One of the best things .NET did was adding minimal APIs in .NET 6 (I think) that are more like Express. They removed a lot of boilerplate and unnecessary stuff, making it easier to start building an API.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#60

Post by bobthepanda »

n_plus_1_acc wrote: post #51
eddd-ddde wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why always say the true beginner programming language is C. Stupid easy to learn, have some loops, have some conditions, make some memory allocations. You will learn about the fundamentals of computing as well, which you might as well ignore (unknowingly) if you start with something like JavaScript (where is this data living in my computer?).

How can you teach C when there's no list of UB, there's sometimes no agreement on how to read the standard, and loads of non-standard-compliant compilers.

Plenty of universities teach C every day even if that means specifying a compiler, and usually it’s a very boring compiler that gets chosen
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