[brrrrrm]

what about NAPI? Or deno/buns JITed api?

I’ve heard this “no C API” thing echoed by a couple people and it’s baffling. Do folks really think three major JS engines all written in C++ wouldn’t have an interface to interact with C?

[chubot]

The problem is evolving the interpreter in a way that doesn't break bazillions of third party bindings -- Win32, OpenGL, Fortran for NumPy/Pandas, databases, GPUs, every C and C++ library ever, etc.

Python's C API exposes ref counting and the GIL. It's also very large

JS doesn't have that problem -- more code is written in pure JS, there are no C/C++ bindings in the browser.

There are C/C++ bindings in node.js for v8, but as far as I know they are discouraged and not used very much. The bindings are more "first party" in node.js than third party.

They have issues, but not the same ones as CPython, because the API is very different

JS VMs must be re-entrant because they're embedded in browsers. That was never the case for CPython

[brrrrrm]

> as far as I know they are discouraged

Fwiw, this a fully stable and well documented API. It’s not even v8 exclusive, Bun cloned it for WebKit.

https://nodejs.org/api/n-api.html

[323]

The only C code JavaScript needs to interact with is 100% under the control of the browser implementing that JavaScript engine.

JavaScript doesn't interact with random C libraries that the user might have, like Python does.

[brrrrrm]

This is unfortunately a bit misinformed. You are thinking of a specific JavaScript implementation (browsers). The language has heavy adoption in the native space. Check out Node.js!

JavaScript does interact with random C libraries :)

[insanitybit]

Yep, although for a very, very long time that wasn't the case.

[brrrrrm]

Well, that changed over a decade ago

[insanitybit]

But V8 and JIT'd runtimes were already standard for years by the time nodejs came out.