Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pizlonator 2 hours ago
No language runtime is ever in a state of "obviously no bugs".

Good luck demanding that of anything of JSC's or LLVM's complexity

2 comments

On one hand, sure, the entire point of a programming language is to make complex ideas able to be expressed in simpler abstractions. On the other hand, we can damn well try.
Damn well trying to enforce an "obviously no bugs" rule in a language runtime would mean zero progress in language runtimes.

We certainly wouldn't have gotten to where we are with runtime and compiler quality and performance if we had damn well tried to enforce such a rule

IMO the very minimum requirement should be that you've demonstrated effort to reduce unnecessary complexity of the problem. Sure, some problems are complex enough that there might not exist an obvious solution, yet usually after a while once you're familiar with some topic the existing solutions do start to appear obvious. If they're not I'd argue we're doing something very very wrong
Adding concurrency to JavaScript definitely falls in the "complex enough" category

So does basically any feature or optimization in a JS runtime

I think it's also worth distinguishing _problem complexity_ and _solution complexity_. The problem might be really really hard (and it very obviously is in the case of adding multi-threading to JavaScript). But it does not mean that the solution has to be hard to understand. It doesn't mean that any average PHP developer (I can say that, I started with PHP) should be able to verify the correctness of the patch, but for a person who is well familiar with the area there shouldn't exist areas they can't understand.

Look at the description of your own Fil-C: it focuses on clarity of explanation of how it works, and it actually does make sense (and, hopefully, works well enough too). Compare that with the pull request sent here. I'll wait

The solution to concurrency in JS is hard to understand and I would expect even hardened JSVM folks (me included) to be super confused by it
Perhaps then it would be better to not use tools of this level of complexity.
I think LLVM is a perfect example of what happens when it's too complicated: it's slow, it's bug-ridden when you stray away from the beaten path (e.g. Rust hits bugs in LLVM like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/l4roqk/a_fix_for_the_... ), and it's really hard to use and understand.

It's obviously not useless because of that, but it's a great example of what happens when you cannot fully control the implementation complexity

So don't use compilers at all?
Compilers aren't made equal either. E.g. compare Visual Studio C++.NET compiler and something like Go. And Go isn't that simple either to be fair
how would you suggest we compile literally anything?