The $9B James Webb Space Telescope Runs JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

The $9B James Webb Space Telescope Runs JavaScript

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19 pointsjakey_bakey12 comments

This is cool. It looks like the creator of the ScriptEase engine wrote about it here [0].

It would be cool to see a style or testing guide to see how they prevented bugs from shipping.

[0] https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm

Another really wacky part is this (Nombas ScriptEase) is the same JS engine used in BeOS NetPositive. Be licensed it, though the layout engine was in-house.

This reminded me about the fact that SpaceX's Dragon human-rated spacecraft uses Chromium, HTML, CSS, and JS. [0]

I used to find this surprising. I still do, but I used to, too.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23403800

I wish this kind of SW was open source.

I mean people bitch but I find js to be safer than C++. These kinds of things really need to use rust.

I doubt that a dynamically typed interpreted language can be "safer" than a statically typed compiled language.

That's because you actually haven't used C++ that much or you haven't used js that much or both. In practice, despite the type system, it is actually less safe. There are bugs in C++ that are so subtle nobody can find it for years.

Javascript is practically safer because each crash leaves an incredibly obvious stack trace about what caused the crash. It leads to programs with less bugs then C++.

I mean if it prevents pointer arithmetic and use after free it can be.

In C++ (specifically) one can limit oneself to using safe constructs provided by the standard library. (C is a different story, of course.)

I think somebody could write a safe C++ library, but the STL hands out dangling references like candy at Halloween. It's very easy to get use-after-free problems with it.

I don't know what you are talking about. (What I meant was, the need for pointer arithmetic can be avoided by using iterators, and use-after-free, by using smart pointers.)

> I don't know what you are talking about.

I can see that.

Iterators don't do what you think they do. A random access iterator on std::vector is practically indistinguishable from a pointer. It doesn't check for out of bounds, and if you resize the vector, your iterator can be "invalidated", meaning it quietly points to memory that has been freed already.

You can even do arithmetic on random access iterators the way you do with pointers.

I agree that smart pointers are nice.

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