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Comment by nercury | Hacker News Reader

I think the JavaScript virtual machines are amazing. Thanks to browser speed wars, they pulled out a trick that I would not have thought possible - making JavaScript fast as hell.

Calling V8 "whatever monkey" is a bit ignorant.

Oh, I haven't said that JavaScript is a good language :)

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I believe the comment meant V8 and {Spider,Trace,Jäger}Monkey (the Mozilla JS engine), which nowadays even beats V8 in some benchmarks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#Tra...

Unfortunately it pushed the industry on the wrong path. Now everyone is coming app with transpilable super-sets and some folks are even pushing the unmaintainable code to the previously safe server-side (node, meteor etc.).

Yes.

Just look what Lars Bak did with JavaScript.

If he would work on the CLR, things could get really awesome.

You mean it could become as awesome as the HotSpot JVM, which was originally based on the StrongTalk VM for SmallTalk, which was in turn based on the Self implementation from Sun Labs? (hint: Lars Bak worked on all of the above)

http://www.strongtalk.org/ http://www.selflanguage.org/

I don't know how much hacks he had to use for the JVM and V8 that could be left out in the CLR.

AFAIK he didn't create those things from scratch, he had to use the Java, SmallTalk, Self and JavaScript specs that were already out in the wild.

JavaScript code is not unmaintainable.

Don't forget that JavaScript is singlethreaded, which makes a lot of things (e.g. GC) easier. I think if JVM or CLR was purely singlethreaded they would gain some more speed.

Web Workers don't as multithreading, they are more like isolated processes than threads.

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