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Exactly. Ruby would probably have massive adoption with JS-like speed.
by VeejayRampay 11y ago
Exactly. Ruby would probably have massive adoption with JS-like speed.
- ajross 11y agoRuby has massive adoption, as do Python and Perl and PHP. Environments with objectively better performance like the JVM and .NET have not, in fact, done all that well comparatively in this environment (which is to say they've done fine too and achieved "massive" adoption, just not that much better than their slower competitors). In fact, looking at the market as it stands right now I'd say that performance concerns are almost entirely uncorrelated with programming environment adoption.
- yxhuvud 11y agoConsidering the massive speed improvements we have been seeing in Javascript, but also languages like Ruby, I'd say compilers is a solved problem for staticly compiled languages, but perhaps not as much for interpreted highly expressive languages.
- abecedarius 11y agoSort of. Lisp had a good combo of expressiveness and speed in the 80s, but it reached that point on the efficiency frontier by different techniques, like heavier use of macros. The newer techniques like trace compilation can make life even better, but the language design decisions in Ruby/Python/etc. that made that sort of thing necessary if you want speed, they didn't really pay for themselves from the perspective of smug Lisp weenies like me who were happy enough with our language and just wanted pragmatics like libraries.
- sklogic 11y agoDid you just call Javascript a "highly expressive" language? Really?!?
- pizlonator 11y agoLOL! It is expressive though. It's got really powerful first-class functions. It's got classes. It's got prototypes. It's got generators. It's got other things that I don't even remember (but will probably have to learn, to implement them, make them fast, and then fix the bugs). I actually think that the reason why JS is so odd is that it is so expressive. That tends to happen with kitchen sink languages like C++. Relevant: "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
- sklogic 11y agoMore expressive than a less imaginative subset of C. More expressive than assembler. Much less expressive than any decent high-level language. Javascript is low level, primitive and clumsy. There is absolutely no excuse for it being so crappy. If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.
- pcwalton 11y ago> If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language. Are you aware who Filip Pizlo is?
- sklogic 11y agoOf course - a low level guy. It is quite likely that he is either not exposed at all to any expressive languages or reject them out of ideological reasons (JikesRVM is quite a strong symptom of the latter case).
- pcwalton 11y agoI have no idea what the Jikes RVM has to do with "ideology". The point is that you're trying to tell someone who has a significant academic and industrial PL pedigree that they don't know what an expressive language is. You seem to have an intense dislike of JavaScript. I'll the first one to admit that JavaScript has a lot of problems. But not being expressive enough is not one of them. JS is, if anything, too dynamic and expressive.
- pizlonator 11y agoajross is right. People choose the languages they like regardless of performance. JS perf is important to users though. Faster execution means fewer watts spent rendering and interacting with your favorite web page. (Fun fact: B3's backend contains a machine description language that gets compiled to C++ code by a ruby script, opcode_generator.rb. We use Ruby a lot.)
- cosinusoidally 11y agoWhy didn't you use JavaScript for that purpose (in a similar vein to how LuaJIT uses Lua for dynasm)?
- pizlonator 11y agoI'm not a big fan of self-hosting. I like that you can build JavaScriptCore without using JavaScriptCore.
- cosinusoidally 11y agoI wasn't really referring to self hosting. I was wondering whether it made sense to write tools like JavaScriptCore's offlineasm in JavaScript rather than Ruby (as LuaJIT does by using Lua for its dynasm tool). The LuaJIT build process actually builds a cut down copy for Lua for the purposes of running dynasm, which is then used to build parts of LuaJIT.
- pizlonator 11y agoWe spend time optimizing JavaScriptCore's build time. It's a hard problem and it's important when managing such a large project. People inevitably have to do clean builds and that sucks when you have >400k lines of C++ code. So, naturally, we want to avoid building JSC twice. ;-)
- iso-8859-1 11y agoSuppose that you are developing not to push this platform, but to simple do better on this platform. What does self-hosting gain you in that case?
- chrisseaton 11y agoMy implementation of Ruby, JRuby+Truffle, is as fast as V8 http://stefan-marr.de/downloads/crystal.html http://stefan-marr.de/downloads/crystal.html
- pizlonator 11y agoNote that usually being "as fast as" a production JSVM means also proving that you can start up as fast as JSVMs do. Have you done this?
- ehsanu1 11y agoSearch around for "Substrate VM". I see it referenced in some slide decks, and it's designed to make JVM startup much faster. Here's an old slidedeck that talks about it: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2013wimmer-2014084.pdf http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2013wimmer-20140...
- ksec 11y agoWow thx for the reminder, I have forgotten about it already. I remember the promise of Truffle + Graal + Substrate VM. My god can't believe it was 3 years ago i read about it on HN.
- pizlonator 11y agoI know about it. I'm not concerned with future hypotheticals, but current actual measurements. That's the currency I deal in.
- ehsanu1 11y agoThere seem to be measurements in the slides I reference, so it wasn't exactly "future work". But of course it sucks that this work is not yet publicly available (AFAIK), probably due to not being 100% production ready yet. But I'm sure it's getting there.