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…
Normally I'd say "it's never too late!" but clearly would diverge and require an entirely new project, maintaining two bases for the same thing, etc.
Not "never exploit"; Reason and BuckleScript are examples of different "language skins" for OCaml. The problem with "skins" is that they create variety where people strive for uniformity to lower the cognitive load. OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.
> OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that. That's one of my hopes for the future of the industry: people will be able to just choose the code style and even syntax family (which you're calling skin) they prefer when editing code, and it will be saved in whatever is the "default" for the language (or even something like the Unison Language: store the AST…
Fabrice, Mr Bellard, O Indefatigable One, if you are reading this, I would love for you to make a JavaScript that compiles to assembly and works across Windows PE, macOS and Linux. Surrendering the various efficiencies of the V8 JIT bytecode in favor of AOT is entirely acceptable for the concision, speed and the chance to "begin again" that this affords. In fact, I believe you may already be working on such an idea!…
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.
Be the change you want to see in the world. If you want to use a specific subset of HTML, CSS and JS, go ahead, make a website using it and offer a browser for similar-spec sites.
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…
> In my programs, I have banned the use of loops. Rather, you no longer see what they're doing clearly.
There's value in both implicit and explicit loops.
Some highly recursive programming styles are really just using the call stack as a data structure... which is valid but can be restrictive.
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…
> yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's
Now quite sure what you mean by that; all of Lua, Pascal, and Ada follow Algol's syntax much more closely than C does.
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…
> If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua.
This would have been a catastrophic loss. Lua is better than javascript in every single way except for ordinal indexing
> 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…
There are a few others that are at least somewhat comparable. Justine Tunney comes to mind (especially the Cosmopolitan family of projects).
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 appreciate all your work and I did not downvote you. One suggestion, though, is that the README looks very AI generated, which makes the project feel low effort, like you just said “hey Claude do a security analysis of this package”. I don’t think this is actually what you did, but it’s hard to know. It’s also very difficult to identify the highlights. Just a few handwritten sentences would be better.