“We have decided not to integrate the Dart VM into Chrome”

Re:“We have decided not to integrate the Dart VM into Chrome” by kevingadd on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @04:07PM (#9265570)

I'm not sure you can argue that Dart is where these features are coming from. SIMD and known type shapes are both very old features that people have been demanding for years. If you follow es-discuss the language you see referenced the most (other than academic ones like E) is C#, by far. The Typed Objects proposal dates back to 2013, possibly earlier, and it's a feature people have wanted for longer than that (ES4 arguably addressed it.) Dart certainly helped influence the SIMD proposal, however, and that's great - it seems like that might have languished for years otherwise.

Regardless, Dart is a great proof-of-concept for strong typing in a browser environment and I'm sure it helped renew faith in it after the disastrous results of the ES4 effort.

I would be interested in seeing Dart's approach to typing attempted as a layer on top of JS. Sort of a 'stronger' TypeScript where the compile pass enforces the kinds of type guarantees Dart provides, perhaps.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“We have decided not to integrate the Dart VM into Chrome” by paulirish on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @07:50PM (#9266867)

To be fair, SIMD in JS was kicked off by John Mccutchan who was on Dart and soon after joined Dart VM team. While there was appetite for SIMD in JS (Brendan, in particular, was a big proponent of John's proposal), I think it wouldn't have happened when it did without Dart and his work.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“We have decided not to integrate the Dart VM into Chrome” by BrendanEich on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @08:55PM (#9267130)

Confirming what Paul writes here. John tweeted, I tweeted back, here:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/308343704194781186

SIMD is in all the SoCs of course, which means it has been on JS stewards' radar for a while now (remember River Trail? see my blog post, which had early Dart humor and Dash-memo reaction: https://brendaneich.com/2011/09/capitoljs-rivertrail/).

I worked at MicroUnity from 1992-5 on many high-risk things including a new CPU that was designed to do extensive SIMD and bit-moving instructions; using these in an instruction-level simulator, I implemented 64-QAM demod and Reed-Solomon error correction for the cable-net of the day (TCL, remember them?). Alas the CPU design was unrealizable in hardware.

SIMD has been around quite a while in hardware, so as KGadd says intrinsics for it have shown up in major languages. It was only a matter of time and the right person for JS, and John McCutchan did the job. Thanks, John!

Google funded John's work for Dart and didn't keep him from doing JS uplift, so thanks to Google too.

[ Parent | on HN ]