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Honest question: Why is building an HPC platform on a language designed in less than 2 weeks something to aspire to? Why not aspire to replace javascript enti

by na85 10y ago

Honest question: Why is building an HPC platform on a language designed in less than 2 weeks something to aspire to? Why not aspire to replace javascript entirely with something better?

sandGorgon 10y ago
huh? ES6/emscripten/Typescript was not designed in 2 weeks. could you talk about what you mean.
- Outpox 10y ago
  He's talking about the first JS specification which was done in 2 weeks IIRC. I've seen such comments several times which completely discard all the effort made to improve JS until now.
- lsadam0 10y ago
  He's talking about Javascript itself. The language has a ton of short-comings, hence the rise of languages that transpile to JS. I agree with the previous sentiment, we should replace JS with something better. JS is a nightmare.
- goatlover 10y ago
  The first version of the language, upon which all other versions have been based, was done in 2 weeks. There are fundamental shortcomings in JS that exist to this day because of that, and because the web has to remain backwards compatibility. So, despite all the improvements over the year, JS is still poor in some areas, particularly when you're talking about porting applications to JS. It was never designed for that.
JohnBooty 10y ago
...because the goal of the Internet Archive is to get playable versions of archived media into your hands, and Chrome/FF/Safari/Edge/etc represent a powerful & free, execution target that everybody already has. Besides -- and this is key -- they're not rewriting it in Javascript. Javascript (via Emscripten) is a compile target for the code they already have. Those who have read the article know this; it's right there in the article: I know that it sounds like porting things to Javascript is crazy. I find that people think we’re rewriting things from scratch, instead of using Emscripten, which compiles out to Javascript as a target (and later WebAssembly). We do not write from scratch.

by na85 10y ago

Honest question: Why is building an HPC platform on a language designed in less than 2 weeks something to aspire to? Why not aspire to replace javascript entirely with something better?

sandGorgon 10y ago

huh? ES6/emscripten/Typescript was not designed in 2 weeks. could you talk about what you mean.

Outpox 10y ago
He's talking about the first JS specification which was done in 2 weeks IIRC. I've seen such comments several times which completely discard all the effort made to improve JS until now.
lsadam0 10y ago
He's talking about Javascript itself. The language has a ton of short-comings, hence the rise of languages that transpile to JS. I agree with the previous sentiment, we should replace JS with something better. JS is a nightmare.
goatlover 10y ago
The first version of the language, upon which all other versions have been based, was done in 2 weeks. There are fundamental shortcomings in JS that exist to this day because of that, and because the web has to remain backwards compatibility. So, despite all the improvements over the year, JS is still poor in some areas, particularly when you're talking about porting applications to JS. It was never designed for that.

JohnBooty 10y ago

...because the goal of the Internet Archive is to get playable versions of archived media into your hands, and Chrome/FF/Safari/Edge/etc represent a powerful & free, execution target that everybody already has. Besides -- and this is key -- they're not rewriting it in Javascript. Javascript (via Emscripten) is a compile target for the code they already have. Those who have read the article know this; it's right there in the article: I know that it sounds like porting things to Javascript is crazy. I find that people think we’re rewriting things from scratch, instead of using Emscripten, which compiles out to Javascript as a target (and later WebAssembly). We do not write from scratch.