Comment by c-smile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by c-smile | Hacker News Reader

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= Value Database

I've added this feature to QuickJS [1] and it works quite well in Sciter as persistent Storage [2] mechanism, used in Sciter.Notes [3] for example.

     let storage = Storage.open(filename);
     let persistentData = storage.root;
     if( !persistentData ) storage.root = persistentData = {... initial storage structure ...};

Everything written to persistentData will be persistent between runs.

= Semi-Dynamic Language

De-facto we already use similar approach quite a while. In form of GPU shaders or WebAssembly. The solution is not in making script JIT friendly (that is against its nature) but with an option to use native/compiled/loadable modules written in languages that were designed to be compileable from the beginning.

My Sciter, as an embeddable engine, is an example of such environment. Native host application exposes native functions/classes to HTML/CSS/JS engine that implements UI layer of the application. UI is dynamic (fluid,styleable,etc.) by nature while application backend (a.k.a. business logic layer) is more static and linear by nature.

[1] https://gitlab.com/c-smile/quickjspp

[2] https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Storage/introduction

[3] https://notes.sciter.com/

I wanted to comment on that persistent data point that on Apple platforms, you’ll have NSUserDefaults (objc) and UserDefaults.myVar (Swift). It works just like the author wishes. Other than single thread access, there’s no major problems with it. If you design your program in a way that it falls apart if the use of it is not regulated, that’s on you.

> on Apple platforms, you’ll have NSUserDefaults (objc) and UserDefaults.myVar (Swift). It works just like the author wishes.

You could write something similar to NSUserDefaults in any language for any computing environment, but that's not what the author is talking about. He is talking about the same basic concept, yes, but where it exists within in the language itself, not something implemented on top.

NSUserDefaults is a key-value storage. Same as localStorage in browsers/js.

On other side persistence in QuickJS is more than that. Essentially it is a NoSQL DB integrated into the language and its runtime. For example you can write

   let uname = root.users[2].firstName;

to access the data using pure language constructs. While with NSUserDefaults you will need to call DB's facade methods like objectForKey("some") and so on.

And also, in QuickJS, Storage is not reading whole DB in memory but fetches/unloads data on demand transparently for the user. You can think about content of DB as about genuine language data structure with root at storage.root

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