langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2008-09-02

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Dienstag, 2. September 2008

Lars Bak: "Ever since we opened the Google office in Aarhus, Denmark, I've been bombarded with the same question. What kind of virtual machine are you working on? Finally, I'm able to answer. It is an open source JavaScript engine and it is fast."

Heck yes, V8 sure is; faster even (for now) than Apple's already amazingly/blazingly fast SquirrelFish.

Who'd have thought just a few months ago that we'd have not one, but three (almost) production-quality high-performance JavaScript engines by September?

I for one welcome the definitive x86 of the web: Hello, JavaScript! You never looked quite as good. I wish you continued mega success.

For a bit more substance, head over to earl.

2008-09-02-canBak

"In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, [Lars Bak] had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside Århus. Then Google called."

Steven Levy's Wired background piece on Google Chrome, V8 and all that is well worth a read.

2008-09-02-reWired

manuel 6015 days AGO
I think JS is more like C than x86...

JS and C have good DNA and are almost usable as PLs but they're usually too low level.

I wonder if it's possible to design a "Lisp" or "Python" that fits well into the JS or C environment. Jonathan Bachrach's Goo seems to be the closest such thing in existence.

chris 6012 days AGO
x86 in the sense that it's part of the Web DNA like x86 is part of the PC DNA (forever?); from many other points of view it's more like C (e.g. in that many people actually write _and_ like it, which fewer would claim of x86 ;-).

I'd be really interested in what ways JavaScript is supposed to be lower-level than Python. But in any case, if you keep track of JavaScript 1.5 < 1.n < 2.0, it's quite apparent that it's growing more Pythonic by the n ... I expect full & successful convergence any decade now.

manuel 6012 days AGO
Some things that come to mind re low-levelness of JS vs Python: Lack of basic library functions (stuff like Array#contains is missing, IIRC); lack of object system (maybe the prototype system is a replacement but I still don't understand it fully); lack of structured exceptions; keyword arguments.

chris 6011 days AGO
So you define "higher-level" simply as "more convenient"?

JavaScript is difficult to compare to other languages in that fashion, because you can't really disentangle the language from its environment (which provides [much of] the "library" [in the form of host objects]) - experientially and as an example, Rhino is a fundamentally different beast than JavaScript-in-the-browser.

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