The numeric conversion instructions you're thinking of are branded "JavaScript", but actually exist to emulate Intel x86 floating-point behavior. It just so happens that the ECMA specs call for said behavior because existing code relied upon it.
Nonsense. A ton of code is still written in C/C++. What do you think runs all of that Javascript?
The C world isn't moving to Javascript, it's moving to Rust, Zig and Go.
Re:The Itanic Has Sunk
by the_only_law on Friday July 30, 2021 @10:02AM
(#28008067)
Kinda veering a bit off topic, but I’ve always seen go marketed as a systems languages alongside C, Rust, etc., but in practice I’ve only really ever seen it used to developer high level web applications.
The computing world has moved on from C, mostly. To Javascript. The main impact of that seems to be a couple of numeric conversion instructions on ARM?
(OK, not entirely fair: the computationally heavy stuff has moved away to GPUs. But if you ask the question for every button press a human makes on a computer where the dominant execution time is you might have some interesting answers, and for a lot of them it is going to be JITted Javascript)
I think it's fairly clear that for general purposes VLIW is not what either the programmer or the compiler writer wants to deal with. In-order execution is such a convenient mental model that people are willing to accept any tricks that keep it working.