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Comment by tentacleuno | Hacker News Reader

> A well designed JS standard library

While I agree here, you also have to remember that additions to the JavaScript standard also increase the amount of time / effort for new browsers to enter the space.

The JavaScript standard (the web APIs, mainly) are already very complex, with Web Workers, Push Notifications, Media Streams, etc. that additions to it should be made cautiously -- once an API is implemented, it's there forever, so the bar for quality is much greater than that of some NPM library.

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A JS standard library would be a drop in the bucket compared to the size and complexity of the DOM libraries and implementing a usably performant JS engine.

Yes it should be done carefully. There are also plenty of examples of how this can be done well, done by experienced engineers. For example, the Dart starndard library (https://dart.dev/libraries - core [1], collection [2] and async [3] in particular) is a very good model that would fit JS fairly well too (with some tweaks and removals)

[1]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-core/dart-core-librar...

[2]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-collection/dart-colle...

[3]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-async/dart-async-libr...

> A JS standard library would be a drop in the bucket compared to the size and complexity of the DOM libraries and implementing a usably performant JS engine.

It's still a nonzero amount of complexity. I see a lot of "v8 is really hard to compete with" comments on here so this feels very pertinent to mention. You can't have it both ways.

> Yes it should be done carefully. There are also plenty of examples of how this can be done well, done by experienced engineers. For example, the Dart starndard library (https://dart.dev/libraries - core [1], collection [2] and async [3] in particular) is a very good model that would fit JS fairly well too (with some tweaks and removals) > > [1]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-core/dart-core-librar...

This one, at least, looks somewhat inspired by JavaScript.

There's a difference between features that need to be implemented as part of the engine such as Web Workers and those that can be implemented as a library, such as sorting; the latter can be shared between implementations much easier.

If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation (a reference implementation maybe?), no need to reinvent the wheel in every part of the browser.

> If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation

That sounds great, but I'm doubtful of the simplicity behind this approach.

If my understanding is correct, v8 has transitioned to C++[0] and Torque[1] code to implement the standard library, as opposed to running hard-coded JavaScript on setting up a new context.

I suspect this decision was made as a performance optimization, as there would obviously be a non-zero cost to parsing arbitrary JavaScript. Therefore, I doubt a JavaScript-based standard library would be an acceptable solution here.

[0]: https://github.com/v8/v8/tree/main/src/runtime [1]: https://v8.dev/docs/torque-builtins -- As I understand it, Torque compiles to C++ at compile-time, which is then linked and compiled into the rest of v8[2]. [2]: https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/main/tools/torque/format-torqu...

Hasn't everyone pretty much given up on making a new (standards compliant) browsers after Microsoft gave up?

(Or are they still trying to make Servo viable?)

> Hasn't everyone pretty much given up on making a new (standards compliant) browsers after Microsoft gave up?

There's plenty of competition, even if the current projects are in a beta (or even alpha) state. Consider the LadyBird browser developed by SerenityOS, or Servo.

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