Re:Show HN: Bel
by chrisseaton on Saturday October 12, 2019 @11:49AM
(#21234047)
JavaScript is an extremely small, well-defined language with relatively simple semantics and very limited metaprogramming. It’s not a challenge compared to something like Ruby.
When was the last time you looked at it? Javascript is not small anymore. ECMAScript specification is over 800 pages, only a few hundred pages smaller than Java's.
Re:Show HN: Bel
by chrisseaton on Saturday October 12, 2019 @01:46PM
(#21234867)
> When was the last time you looked at it?
I’ve read the latest version of the specs of all these languages in detail.
I’ve worked professionally on a team implementing Ruby, the latest version of JavaScript, and Java at the same time, using the same language implementation system, so I can directly compare.
JavaScript is simplest by far. There’s quite a lot of sugar now, but the core semantics are small and simple. The core semantics of a language like Ruby are an order of magnitude more complicated.
Some languages are easier to be made faster, but I think JS almost proves there’s no such thing as a language incompatible with high performance by design.
You’d be hard pressed to conceive a more dynamic language and here we are, with crazy fast performance through many JIT tiers, interpreters, compilers, each of which would take years for a bright engineer to understand.