[bigstrat2003]

That's horrifying. Javascript doesn't belong anywhere near anything which isn't a web page, and even then it's questionable.

[phist_mcgee]

Maybe the engineers at NASA know what they're doing?

[ClassyJacket]

As a JavaScript hater, I admit they surely they do, but I'm still curious as to why it was the best choice. If it's a custom runtime, existing runtimes being reliable\secure\well understood by existing engineers isn't relevant. And it's not like they're adding in lots of external libraries either.

I found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454

" The language itself wasn’t so important as having adequate performance, robustness, memory use, reproducibility and extreme QC"

but I still don't understand. Interesting they went with a language that doesn't even have integers.

At least the comments on this reddit thread have some hilarious jokes:

https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/wrtny3/the_jame...

Looks like they released a paper, the abstract of which, indicates it's not a fully custom runtime, which would make more sense:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra...

Unfortunately they want money to read the rest of it and I'm curious but not that curious, and I probably wouldn't understand it anyway.

[phist_mcgee]

It's a very readable paper. The paper's DOI is 10.1117/12.671403, and you can read it for free on Sci Hub.

[ClassyJacket]

Thanks. Yeah, I thought of that, but I'm at work at a place where I very much should not be having Sci Hub in my browsing log.

[tetris11]

no one's doubting it, but they still want to know the reason because it goes contrary to the expectations of most developers here, even the JavaScript fans