dherman

15 ms·

31.
by dherman 11y ago
Agreed! In fact it would also be useful in Node: you could build an almost-full-performance but portable version of a native module as a fallback for clients who don't have the requisite software to build a Neon library (say, one they
32.
by dherman 11y ago
Eat my dust! :P
33.
by dherman 11y ago
Watching Christmas movies with the family right now but I'll file a bug with some hints later. :)
34.
by dherman 11y ago
Yeah, that's all, just crawling before I walk. Lots of work to do, and very excited to welcome contributors and collaborators!
35.
by dherman 11y ago
Fun :) Back in my Racket days (back then it was known as PLT Scheme and dinosaurs roamed the web) I did a similar thing: http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/dherman/javascr... The Javadot notation was rea
36.
by dherman 11y ago
I agree it doesn't make sense for Servo to be a drop-in replacement for Gecko, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't bend Firefox towards compatibility with Servo. A future Servo-based Firefox is far enough off that it's im
37.
by dherman 12y ago
(Director of Strategy for Mozilla Research here.) pdf.js was the brainchild of Andreas Gal, now our CTO but at the time a cofounder of Mozilla Research along with Brendan Eich and me. That project started briefly in Research but was shepher
38.
by dherman 12y ago
Announcement and details are here: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/11/20/Cargo.html
39.
by dherman 12y ago
The float taketh away and the clear: both giveth back again: http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-...
40.
Another Big Milestone for Servo: Acid2(blog.mozilla.org)
345 points by dherman 12y ago|96 comments
41.
by dherman 13y ago
The downside of picking subtler, more intricate examples is that you waste your reader's time trying to understand the subtleties of the example, which isn't teaching them anything about Rust. Another option is to say something li
42.
by dherman 13y ago
Agreed, and happily sweet.js is very consciously modeled after Racket.
43.
by dherman 13y ago
Diverging from JS would require standardization, but it's too early to consider something like that. I don't know what our ultimate plan for threads will be or where asm.js will eventually end up; there are plenty more discussions
44.
by dherman 13y ago
Yes, threading is definitely the main challenge for asm.js. I'm not as pessimistic as you about it, though. :)
45.
by dherman 13y ago
I also want to add that the "it's just JS" thing is not somehow an argument of the shining nobility of asm.js. It's purely practical as what we believe is a viable approach to moving the web in the same direction that e.
46.
by dherman 13y ago
> My statement was correct. It's not JavaScript, which is why you use a keyword to switch to a different compiler mode. I'm afraid your statement really wasn't correct. asm.js is both syntactically and semantically JavaScr
47.
by dherman 13y ago
If you need any help with that, don't be shy to jump on #rust on irc.mozilla.org. The team would be happy to answer any questions you may have along the way.
48.
by dherman 13y ago
I think you're mixing up tail recursion with general recursion. Rust absolutely supports recursion: the implementation uses segmented stacks to allow for stacks to grow dynamically. Tail call support is about not having the stack grow but o
49.
by dherman 14y ago
We've talked about versioning, and I think feature detection is probably the best approach. If the user agent publishes a list of supported asm.js features via a standard query mechanism (note that this is a feature list, not browser dete
50.
by dherman 14y ago
Thanks for the erratum report. I always mix those two up! :-/ I've added it to the errata page: https://github.com/effectivejs/site/wiki/Errata (Let me know if I got your name wrong for the credit; I followed links from your HN profile.)
51.
by dherman 14y ago
Right, that's the idea of FunctionBlob. It wraps a browser-internal representation of the optimized compiled code. The web code can instruct the browser to store that offline, without exposing its implementation-specific details to the web
52.
by dherman 14y ago
Yes, absolutely. When we first started talking about the project I seriously considered designing a "disassembly" syntax, to make it easier. We can still do that pretty easily, it's just taking a bit of a back seat to getting v1 of the spec
53.
by dherman 14y ago
> It's rather indicative of Mozilla's approach to life, namely, write everything in JS out of some pseudomasochistic desire for backward compatibility hacks. I'm just trying to make progress in a messy world. JS is not my ideal programm
54.
by dherman 14y ago
I was only thinking that it would be internal. Your server point is good, but I think way, way harder, and kind of starts the whole project back at the beginning: how to design a standard, efficient, optimized bytecode format. So I think it
55.
by dherman 14y ago
> I want my bytecode to look like this: `iadd`, NOT `(a+b)|0`. So build a front-end! I actually thought about doing this myself, because I knew we would get people confused about the difference between syntax and semantics. The syntax i
56.
by dherman 14y ago
We have plans! First of all, we do care very much about supporting compilers for managed languages like Java and C#, but we're starting with this first version that only supports zero GC and atomic primitive types. We have plans to grow out
57.
by dherman 14y ago
What you're asking for is drastically harder to achieve from a security perspective. If we didn't care about security, we could just standard the Linux syscalls or something and call it a day. :) But what we're doing here is providing the
58.
by dherman 14y ago
There are good and bad things about PNaCl. But overall, the resistance to PNaCl goes beyond Mozilla -- it's a really hard standardization/synchronization problem. Our goal with asm.js was to produce something that could work today (because
59.
by dherman 14y ago
The code has to be explicitly marked as asm.js, using a pragma similar to ES5 strict mode. This way if the code fails to validate, the errors can be reported to the browser's developer tools. As for debugging, the story is the same as Emscr
60.
by dherman 14y ago
That's true, but JoshTriplett has a reasonable point. In point of fact, we are discussing custom value types like int32 and uint32, as well as compound value types like immutable records, for the future of ECMAScript: http://wiki.ecmascr

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