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Comment by ea016 | Hacker News Reader

Well, as Jeff Atwood famously said [0], "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript". I guess that applies to embedded systems too

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Atwood

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Well, wasn't Fabrice Bellard the guy who built a virtual machine with JS so that you could run Linux within the browser?

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33...

And thanks to that we can run Linux in a PDF as well..

Fabrice is an absolute legend. Most people would be content with just making QEMU, but this guy makes TinyC and FFmpeg and QuickJS and MicroQuickJS and a bunch of other huge projects.

I am envious that I will never anywhere near his level of productivity.

Not just programming either; he invented a mathematical technique for calculating the nth hex digit of pi

Not to detract from his status as a legend, but I think the kind of person that singlehandedly makes one of these projects is exactly the kind of person that would make the others.

I forgot about FFmpeg (thanks for the reminder), but my first thought was "yup that makes perfect sense".

Sure, they're not unrelated or anything, but at the same time, they're all really important, huge projects.

I know it's not true, but it would be funny if Bellard had access to AI for 15 years (time-traveler, independent invention, classified researcher) and that was the cause of his superhuman producitvity.

AI will let 10,000 Bellards bloom - or more.

And FFMPEG, the standard codec suite for Unix today. And Qemu, the core of KVM. Plus TCC, a great small compiler compared to C/Clang altough cparser has better C99 coverage. Oh, and some DVB transmitter reusing the MHZ radiation from a computer screen by tweaking the Vidtune values from X. It's similar to what Tempest for Eliza does.

Indeed

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

Sounds a bit like rule 35 of the Internet.

Please don't use js in medical devices.

attempt at humor:Okay so, would you rather your beloved great aunt's pacemaker fail because the software in it was written in C, and there's a use-after-free memory error, or because the software in it was written in JavaScript, and because someone used `==` instead of `===` a boolean that should have been `false` is `true`?

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