News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by davedx on Sunday May 31, 2020 @08:40AM (#23369192)
You haven’t made any arguments about why Javascript isn’t good for building UIs there. Here’s mine for why it is:

- first class functions (callback style is a good fit for UI programming)

- async/await and single threaded - many components of UIs are async by nature, Javascript supports you well here while keeping things simple with its single threaded model

Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by heavyset_go on Sunday May 31, 2020 @03:40PM (#23372050)
Sharing the UI thread with logic is something to be mitigated when building UIs, it's not a feature.
Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by davedx on Monday June 01, 2020 @08:33AM (#23377759)
In theory, maybe. In practice, your UI thread very rarely has to do the kind of heavy lifting that would block it so badly you actually have problems.

I have encountered this -- for example parsing very large incoming JSON payloads -- but very rarely. And if you really need to mitigate it, there are webworkers.

Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by vertex-four on Sunday May 31, 2020 @10:52AM (#23369928)
There's... a large number of languages with both of those features.
Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by scotty79 on Sunday May 31, 2020 @04:35PM (#23372495)
Could you name few better than js?
Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by vertex-four on Sunday May 31, 2020 @05:45PM (#23373054)
In the context of writing reliable software for a spacecraft? Pretty much anything with a reasonable type system, for a start. Maybe C#, or some reasonable subset of C++20, or Rust. Maybe Reason or OCaml.
Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by errantspark on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:28PM (#23373988)
I mean very clearly the good people at SpaceX have heard of these languages and decided against it. I think JS and Chromium are the best UI kit I can think of in terms of man hours to get X done. If you're careful the only thing I've ever had issues with is latency, but in space if you're in a situation where missing a frame or two is important you're already beyond fucked.
Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by zeroc8 on Monday June 01, 2020 @03:27AM (#23376097)
From my experience, Qt/QML is way better for things like that. I mean, the UI does not need to be responsive, does it?

Maybe they couldn't afford the Qt license.

Re:What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (2015) by davedx on Monday June 01, 2020 @08:40AM (#23377809)
Many people are using TypeScript these days, it works very well.

I like C# and Rust too. I've built UI's in C++ and MFC/OpenGL/DirectX. It remains my fairly strong opinion that JavaScript is well suited to UI development.