I think this is the point where it starts being hard to argue that ARM is RISC anymore. x86 has BCD support and special facilities to handle NUL-terminated stri

I think this is the point where it starts being hard to argue that ARM is RISC anymore. x86 has BCD support and special facilities to handle NUL-terminated strings (i.e. C-strings) but now ARM has instructions with "javascript" in the name. At least Jazelle was a separate extensions. I mean I suppose it makes sense for them to do that, especially if the performance benefits are as huge as outlined in this tweet, but damn it feels dirty. I assume the reason for this is that in JS, as far as I know, all numbers are stored as floats right? So you keep casting everywhere when you need an integer? I assumed that JS implementations where a bit more clever and kept them as ints whenever possible but maybe it's not as simple as I had imagined.