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by jonstewart 4245 days ago
Oh. Dear. God. JavaScript is going to become the x86 of our time, i.e., the historically awful patchwork of kludges that gets passed onto each generation to kludge anew which also runs the entire world. JavaScript: we don't have integers, but, dammit, we have vector instructions. FML.

Maybe it's not too late to take up painting.
4 comments
implicit 4244 days ago
We haven't hit the insanity limit quite yet.

It looks like Alon Zakai is working on something the "Emterpreter," which is a bytecode format that Emscripten could compile to to sacrifice some runtime performance for startup time. (JS parse time is quite a big deal for Emscripten applications)

I am hoping that this effort goes really really well. So well that browser engines start natively supporting this bytecode.

Then JS can actually die.

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eukaryotia 4245 days ago
It's rapidly moving into hardware development as well, eg:

https://tessel.io/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gfw/espruino-javascript...

http://nodebots.io/

This is what programming is now.

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msds 4245 days ago
No, it's rapidly moving into toy hardware platforms targeted at web developers.
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ndesaulniers 4245 days ago
> JavaScript: we don't have integers

More like "we don't have 64b ints, yet."

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general_failure 4245 days ago
Don't hold your breath. http://www.slideshare.net/BrendanEich/value-objects2
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ep103 4245 days ago
>SIMD.js is originally derived from the Dart SIMD specification

I am so ungodly sick of Google pushing DART technologies everywhere. I really am starting to think their strategy is embrace, enhance, exterminate.

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pcwalton 4245 days ago
If you don't like Dart, then you should actually be in favor of this move. It negates what was previously an advantage of Dart over JavaScript.
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spankalee 4244 days ago
Apologies, but we don't push Dart. You don't have to use it. Google writes millions of lines of JavaScript a year and wants a better language, that's all.

As pcwalton says, SIMD.js evens an advantage that was in favor of Dart, while at the same time making JavaScript a better compile target for languages like Dart and asm.js languages like C++. It's also a really clean API that fits nicely onto typed arrays. What's not to like?

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