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Steady-state performance tends to be better on the JVM but startup performance is always much better on top of JavaScript. That makes it an enticing trade off
by lvh 9y ago
Steady-state performance tends to be better on the JVM but startup performance is always much better on top of JavaScript. That makes it an enticing trade off for shells which is a process that you start new ones of constantly and where the performance of the shell itself is often not very important. (Performance-critical or hard-to-duplicate code like, say, line editing code, can be done equally well on either platform via FFI.)
- earenndil 9y agoWhy not just make a server that starts up once in the background and then a lightweight c frontend to the server that essentially just pipes every keystroke to the server?
- cben 9y agoShells are supposed to inherit a ton of state from their parent — [e]uid, groups, working dir, env vars, nice, umask, chroot, ... This takes zero effort in unix, but would all have to be (securely!) re-implemented to be able to send code to a shared execution daemon... And I expect the right implementation for many of these params will be running separate daemons anyway (eg. you clearly want one per user).