Hacker News Reader

I have been using and advocating Javascript for over 10 years.

I believe language evolution like ES6 are more than welcome. However, I have the impression that the path taken by the committee and the new proposals do not bring great gains (whether in UX, code reading, performance, etc.) but bringing unnecessary complexity.

On the other hand, other serious problems such as the mathematical and numerical part of the language are being left aside.

View on HN

From what I’ve read, TC39 acknowledges that this is important and is working on fixing JavaScript’s deficiencies in this area:

– BigInts (arbitrary precision integers) were a recent addition: https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_bigints.html

– A proposal for `Decimal` (base 10 floating point numbers with arbitrary precision) is currently at stage 1: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decimal

Can you describe more about what are the serious problems in the math/numerical parts? (curious, not skeptical)

I’d characterize JS as having moderately annoying numeric limitations rather than serious problems. Two that come mind:

Not having 64 bit integers is a large annoyance. There’s workarounds but none of them are especially ergonomic.

The expression n | 0 is a signed 32 bit int. The expression n >>> 0 is an unsigned 32 bit int.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com