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Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

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Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#71

Post by ronsor »

simonw wrote: post #64
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.

He's also built a closed-source LLM inference engine, which he's been maintaining since the GPT-2 days: https://bellard.org/ts_server/ and https://textsynth.com/

I used to play around with Textsynth, but not being OSS killed the appeal for me once llama.cpp came around.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#72

Post by andrewmcwatters »

qweqwe14 wrote: post #11
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.

This would never happen because there's zero incentive to do this. Browsers are complex because they solve a complex problem: running arbitrary applications in a secure manner across a wide range of platforms. So any "simple" browser you can come up with just won't work in the real world (yes, that means being compatible with websites that normal people use).

[dead]

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#73

Post by colesantiago »

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…

It is because you keep over promoting AI almost every day of the week in the HN comments.

In this particular case AI has nothing to do with Fabrice Bellard.

We can have something different on HN like what Fabrice Bellard is up to.

You can continue AI posting as normal in the coming days.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#74

Post by coryrc »

vbezhenar wrote: post #70
stronglikedan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.

My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content. Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should…

You can just use HTML4 if you want, it's already supported and standardized. Markdown is very much not.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#75

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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.

For all the praise he gets here, few seem interested in his methods: writing complete programs, based on robust computer science, with minimal dependencies and tooling.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#76

Post by simonw »

colesantiago wrote: post #73
simonw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is because you keep over promoting AI almost every day of the week in the HN comments. In this particular case AI has nothing to do with Fabrice Bellard. We can have something different on HN like what Fabrice Bellard is up to. You can continue AI posting as normal in the coming days.

Forget about the AI bit. Do you think it's interesting that MicroQuickJS can be used from Python via FFI or as a compiled module, and can also be compiled to WebAssembly and called from Node.js and Deno and from Pyodide running in a browser?

... and that it provides a useful sandbox in that you can robustly limit both the memory and time allowed, including limiting expensive regular expression evaluation?

I included the AI bit because it would have been dishonest not to disclose how I used AI to figure this all out.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#77

Post by born-jre »

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.

There could be a way: This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation. - TV screens UI - some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam store page kind) - some electron apps / lighter cross platform engine - less sucky QML - i think weechat or sth has own xml bashed app froamework thing (so could be useful to people wanting to build everything app app platform - much richer markdown format ?

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#78

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

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 downvoted because I'm tired of people regurgitating how they've done this or that with whatever LLM of the week on seemingly every technical post.

If you care that much, write a blog post and post that, we don't need low effort LLM show and tell all day everyday.

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#79

Post by eichin »

Anyone know how this compares to Espruino? The target memory footprint is in the same range, at least. (I know very little about the embedded js space, I just use shellyplugs and have them programmed to talk to BLE lightswitches using some really basic Espruino Javascript.)

Re: Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

#80

Post by nozzlegear »

zppln wrote: post #49
christophilus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, I don't have to run a binary to try your product. The web has a lot of flaws, but it's a good way to deliver properly sandboxed applications with low hassle on the part of the user. I've built my fair share of native vs web apps, and I vastly prefer working on web apps. As a user, I vastly prefer web apps for most things. Not all things, but most. No, I don't want to install your crappy app on my computer and ri…

I can't think of a single thing where I prefer a web app over a native alternative, unless it's for one-off use.

I have several web apps installed over the native alternatives. Discord is the most prominent one; I've found their native app has been getting shittier by the day over recent months, while the web app remains as snappy as any Safari page. Plus I can run an adblocker and other extensions in the web app which improve the experience.
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