LinguaBrowse

Playing around with the demos, none of the solutions seem very centred at all?

I think the lh unit is surely part of the puzzle, but something more is needed. It assumes that the ascent and descent are symmetrical, for one thing.

Having recently got permanent residency in Japan, I thought I might share a bit about the motivations and process for any other engineers interested in making such a move.

Safari does support extensions (implemented as Safari App Extensions that can wrap standard Web Extensions if desired).

There was a time where WKWebView didn’t support Web Extensions (i.e. Web Extensions could only be used with Safari). But since iOS 18.4, the WKWebExtension API has made it possible. I’ve been using it successfully to embed a Web Extension into my ebook reader app.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebextens...

I’ve moved my S&P 500 investments to the Equal Weight index to reduce my exposure to AI. Quite aside from SpaceX, I think the large-cap tech companies are making some uncomfortably large bets on AI and any major upset could cause a domino effect.

But as so many ETFs have a significant stake in large-cap US tech stocks (the top 10 holdings of the iShares MSCI World ETF is entirely comprised US Big Tech, making up 20% of the value of the ETF), I found S&P 500 Equal Weight to be pretty attractive.

As for SpaceX itself? I feel the numbers involved all sound a bit unbelievable to me. I fear that there will be a rug-pull sometime post-IPO, and retail investors (and taxpayers, if the US Government ends up taking a stake, as they have recently indicated they might do for OpenAI) will inevitably be left holding the bag.

They're closed for sign-ups, so no way to view their feed :(

But happy to follow those accounts.

I definitely feel this. We're a far cry from the early days of Facebook where you could just post your thoughts and feelings and real people you'd know and care about would come and interact with you. Now all I see is posts from grifters and politics bots, and it's desperately hard to get my own stuff seen, even as an established account.

I want a new platform.

The thing about Hacker News is that it's a real fight for life to get any engagement. Just showing the humble project you're working on doesn't cut it. You need to time your submission just right and impress like you're doing a product launch, otherwise you get no visibility and no comments. Social media shouldn't have to be so exhausting and competitive.

Oh, drat. Just about to go to bed now, but I’ll sort that out tomorrow. Thanks!

I've learned a lot over 10 years as a software engineer and thought it was about time I had a place to write up all this hard-earned knowledge. So I created a docs site, for myself!

I gradually realised that, as a "personal" docs site, it needn't be limited to just software notes. I could write whatever I like on this thing. Why not recipes? Sheet music? Or language study notes? The MDX format makes it easy to express anything I want, the source and output are available from any device, and it all gets indexed for search, so it's quite compelling versus basic solutions like Apple Notes.

So over the last month, I've been filling it out with articles to show the full potential of such a resource. I feel like we could all find a use for a personal docs site!

I'm keeping my eye on Void0, yeah! If anyone can live up to such promises, it'll be them.

They'll have a tough job getting sticky ecosystems like React Native to adopt, but hope to see them make a compelling case for their stack.

Thank you for the kind words! Glad to get this one out of the way so that I can do some less ambitious articles for a change. But hope to make them good in their own way, too!

Eh, writing is hard!

A very good thought! Deno and Bun have this formidable funding for sure, but Node.js is still innovating. Things like type-stripping and require(esm) come to mind. I think as long as big companies use it for Electron, Node.js will continue to get investment. Even if the investment were to dry up, experience teaches us that old tools die hard.

I would hope that interoperability goes up. The React Native community are closing in on support for Node-API, and with that maybe we can start sharing native code between desktop and mobile. The WinterCG effort is also going well.

As for canaries, I think sustainability is the main thing to look at. What is the surface area of this tool, how much expertise and effort does it take to maintain it, and who is invested in its survival? The more we can share common implementations like Intl and Temporal, the easier it is for smaller players to keep up. And of course, the more the big players try to diverge (looking at you, Chrome), the harder it gets.

Could be to draw upon the existing JavaScript ecosystem, or could just be because JavaScript is the language the dev knows best! I feel really nerfed when I have to move from JavaScript to other languages, personally, even if I can get things done in C++ and other languages.

Thank you! I'd tend to default to Expo if building a mobile app in JavaScript these days, but Capacitor, Tauri, and NativeScript are all good options too.

Thank you very much, really appreciate it! There's a respectable article on engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_engines), but indeed, no article on runtimes. I did feel that they were under-discussed compared to engines, though, with most analysis focusing on browsers and Node-alikes, so wanted to add something to the literature.

Very cool, though when I was qualifying the scope for "the last decade", I was doing it by creation date rather than usage date, so I think I get a pass on this one!

I've heard nothing but high praise for GraalJS, yeah. I wonder whether it'd make any sense inside mobile apps – not due to any feature in mind, but simply out of interest because that's more the area I'm using JavaScript. The first-class interop with Java would be great for Android, though I wonder how cheap its interop with iOS (C-family languages) would be.

> Did you consider things like JScript.NET? jsc.exe still comes with every Windows installation, and JScript still runs on IIS server (I have built a few things with it).

I've not heard of any of these, wow – very cool that it's still bundled with Windows. I suspect that most things related to JScript wouldn't fit the scope of "the last decade", though? I tended to focus on creation date when deciding what should be in scope.

> And what about things like Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and Illustrator which can run Javascript using either Extendscript in older versions or V8 in modern versions.

Hmm, these may well qualify, you're right. Maybe I can add them to the addendum. I'd want to do a bit of research to understand their timeline and genealogy before including them, though. Wrists beginning to hurt for today now, though!

I do recall now that Adobe PDFs can run JavaScript. That would've been worth a mention for sure.

No idea! The only benchmarks I'm aware of for QuickJS are against other JavaScript engines (https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html).

That said, one thing I've heard a lot from NativeScript TSC members building on top of QuickJS is that QuickJS has staggeringly low overhead for calling C functions. In fact, I was shown benchmarks in which it calls native functions faster than JS functions (perhaps it's easier to optimise because JS functions have complications like closure capture to worry about). I imagine this has conceptual overlap with how V8's Fast API works.

The other reploies seem to have answered it! I've never understood why iOS allows JIT inside WKWebView yet not inside bare JavaScriptCore. Maybe because WKWebView runs in its own separate process while a JavaScriptCore instance would run in-process? As for Android, guess Google are just a little more gung-ho?

> thanks for the article. these days it's rare to see something so well researched and written while still being able to tell it was authored by a human. cheers

Really appreciated, thanks! I do despaire that the ease of generating content with AI disincentivises (and discourages) authors from expending real effort, but there's a satisfying inflection point at which you can be sure you've written something that an LLM couldn't possibly have come up with.

I totally agree that the lack of JIT has been a huge waste of human resources. NativeScript and React Native have had to move so many mountains to make viable software despite it.

Oh right, thanks for the insight. Wondering how to rephrase it. Did AWS at least create it, or fund it?

rquickjs looks like a good one to include in the article. I've just edited it into the polyglot engines section (I think I've got a mix of engines and runtimes in there at this point anyway).

I'm not familiar with the term "context tracking", and management of the event loop is a bit lower level than I normally go, but I do know several runtimes use libuv (https://libuv.org) to handle asynchronous I/O, the same as Node.js (which it was created for).

I'm sure there will be JavaScript runtimes out there using some of Rust's asynchronous schedulers like tokio (https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/), too, but I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them just do things bespoke.

> I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser

Not so much! Rhino was an effort to rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java, and I expect that if that rewrite had taken off, Java might've gained a foothold (though indeed, there were Java applets for a time).

There were also Flash apps, and of course there are some significant games based on WebAssembly and low-level graphics APIs.

But ultimately JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic, allowing you to be less rigid in how you architect things. And by being a scripting language, it's super quick to iterate on.

Thank you! It did cross my mind. I've archived a couple of the hard-won links in there that I had a feeling at great risk of rotting. But thankfully a lot of the links are to GitHub pages, so I'm not so worried about those.

Unfortunately, I think the article's readability would suffer if every single link were followed by an [archive] tag. Wikipedia have a better setup for providing both an archive link and a live link, which unfortunately the newsletter format doesn't really lend itself to.

I think copying the links as-is into the Wayback Machine will generally do in a pinch – just a bit of a pain to find the right month to roll back to.

At 17 years old, I think it's comfortably outside of the scope of the article I was focusing on (the last decade), but thanks for bringing it to my attention!

> Ejacs is based heavily on work by Brendan Eich (SpiderMonkey, Narcissus) and Norris Boyd (Mozilla Rhino).

I did mention all of these, at least!

I deliberately scoped it to the last decade because I felt it would be very hard to dig up information from around 1996 – would be better for me to leave that period to folks who were active developers around that time and lived through it all.

But I did make sure to give Chakra a few mentions!

I had some faith this time as I saw a good handful of readers opening the email just moments after I'd posted the newsletter out!

And while I figured Hacker News would be a coin flip, for other sites that show link previews, I was optimistic that the cartoons would encourage a click, too. In a time where many writers are using soulless AI-generated poster images, just putting in a token effort to do something original goes a long way.

Author here – the return on investment will be modest, no doubt. I started the newsletter in order to share any thoughts on various topics without having to please a social media algorithm to get seen. Winning a few new readers for my efforts is all I'm really looking!

As for the article getting regurgitated, I am not too worried. It is simply an awfully long, awfully dense article for any LLM to synthesise more than a handful of bullet points out of, so I think any derivative product is going to make for a far less engrossing read. Indeed, if you try asking ChatGPT about runtimes right now, you'll get a pathetically shallow and mainstream analysis.

There may well be clickbait articles spawned from this, but I'm optimistic that people will find the source and be able to tell in an instance that it's the Real McCoy.