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Maybe the engineers at NASA know what they're doing?
by phist_mcgee 2y ago
Maybe the engineers at NASA know what they're doing?
- ClassyJacket 2y agoAs a JavaScript hater, I admit they surely they do, but I'm still curious as to why it was the best choice. If it's a custom runtime, existing runtimes being reliable\secure\well understood by existing engineers isn't relevant. And it's not like they're adding in lots of external libraries either. I found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454 " The language itself wasn’t so important as having adequate performance, robustness, memory use, reproducibility and extreme QC" but I still don't understand. Interesting they went with a language that doesn't even have integers. At least the comments on this reddit thread have some hilarious jokes: https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/wrtny3/the_james_webb_space_telescope_runs_javascript/ https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/wrtny3/the_jame... Looks like they released a paper, the abstract of which, indicates it's not a fully custom runtime, which would make more sense: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra... Unfortunately they want money to read the rest of it and I'm curious but not that curious, and I probably wouldn't understand it anyway.
- phist_mcgee 2y agoIt's a very readable paper. The paper's DOI is 10.1117/12.671403, and you can read it for free on Sci Hub.
- ClassyJacket 2y agoThanks. Yeah, I thought of that, but I'm at work at a place where I very much should not be having Sci Hub in my browsing log.
- tetris11 2y agono one's doubting it, but they still want to know the reason because it goes contrary to the expectations of most developers here, even the JavaScript fans