James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interpreter by a bankrupt company

Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by zaarn on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @09:47AM (#19738255)

> The last 10 years have created a legion of developers who are really only familiar with JavaScript

That probably played 0 role into this. When the project was created, about 20 to 15 years ago, people put in the design specs. The language selection was JS, Python 1.5 (1.5, not 2, not 3, 1.5, released in 1999) and a custom script language.

NASA decided for JS because Python used more memory.

The JS that is being run is essentially IE6 or IE5-level, so none of the modern features introduced in IE8 and forwards that make it all so easy.

I'd expect more modern variants of JS (TypeScript) or even something like Rust to make an appearence in 15 years or so. Atleast for these kinds of missions.

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by plopz on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @09:54AM (#19738315)

Yeah, in 2003 this version of js worked with vxworks and didn't leak memory like python. I'm sort of surprised they didn't go with tcl though.

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by harshreality on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @10:09AM (#19738473)

The reason they didn't choose tcl had nothing to do with the language.

> 2. An attempt was made to port each scripting engine to the VxWorks real-time operating system on a flight-like Power PC by embedding it into a payload flight software application. TCL was dropped from the study when it could not be successfully ported to VxWorks. JavaScript, Python and G-script were successfully ported and a series of tests with prototype flight software applications were run in order to rank them against the success criteria.

https://www.scribd.com/document/407354589/Event-driven-James...

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by cartoonfoxes on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @10:50AM (#19738886)

I would have assumed porting TCL would have been the most straightforward of the bunch. What features made it so difficult to work with?

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by plopz on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @10:12AM (#19738495)

Ahh, that makes sense then.

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by theandrewbailey on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @10:12AM (#19738487)

Was the Python 1 to 2 migration anywhere near as bad as the bloodbath that 2 to 3 has been?

(My guess: no, but that happened well before my Python initialization.)

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by simonh on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @10:39AM (#19738771)

The Python community was growing so fast, within a couple of years most Python developers had never used 1.x. Also 2.0 introduced an awful lot of very valuable improvements. In any case, 1.6 had some source incompatibilities with 1.5.2 anyway, so eh.

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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by michelpp on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @12:13PM (#19739880)

1->2 was not backwards incompatible like 2->3 was.

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