Maybe the engineers at NASA know what they're doing?

As a JavaScript hater, I admit they surely they do, but I'm still curious as to why it was the best choice. If it's a custom runtime, existing runtimes being reliable\secure\well understood by existing engineers isn't relevant. And it's not like they're adding in lots of external libraries either.

I found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454

" The language itself wasn’t so important as having adequate performance, robustness, memory use, reproducibility and extreme QC"

but I still don't understand. Interesting they went with a language that doesn't even have integers.

At least the comments on this reddit thread have some hilarious jokes:

https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/wrtny3/the_jame...

Looks like they released a paper, the abstract of which, indicates it's not a fully custom runtime, which would make more sense:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra...

Unfortunately they want money to read the rest of it and I'm curious but not that curious, and I probably wouldn't understand it anyway.

It's a very readable paper. The paper's DOI is 10.1117/12.671403, and you can read it for free on Sci Hub.

Thanks. Yeah, I thought of that, but I'm at work at a place where I very much should not be having Sci Hub in my browsing log.

no one's doubting it, but they still want to know the reason because it goes contrary to the expectations of most developers here, even the JavaScript fans