kizer

God, reading these comments generates inspiration in me to create a pristine, beautiful language for you all to lust over. Lolol

Best and worst thing about programming to me: it can be applied. Pro: I get to make good money with my “art” of choice. Con: I have to create hideous monstrosities.

Good point on responsiveness; perhaps layout could be HTML. I guess this is a bit black and white, but I’d rather embrace a single tech entirely and simplify the whole design, interactivity, etc process. Then tooling could be more easily reused; libraries would generate potentially complex SVG path vector components that would take a bunch of CSS hacks and :before/divs on divs.

To address the second paragraph; I have a feeling that the limitations of HTML/css influence to a degree some of the result UI design. If you look at some stellar native UI’s, there are many little details and also more complex interactions which would be very bulky to implement in a web app, with probably prohibitively bad perf. It’s hard to think of examples, but maybe the JetBrains IDE’s, CAD tools, MS office (their online versions use almost all SVG, at least in PowerPoint).

In the benchmarks provided on Flow’s site webrender was still 5x slower, and about 2x faster than FF regular.

The new engine is still a WIP which you can download and play with on MDN. But I’ve read that parts of FF proper are now using rust. Situation is murky to me.

I’m basically going to treat the whole web platform as a compilation target. As long as the result is accessible, I’d like to forget about the “big three” for some time.

In this sense it means not requiring a precompilation step. JITing is an implementation detail; also modern engines compile to a bytecode first during interpretation.

There’s the “webview” project on github which does this.

Pretty interesting that I posted this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512333) thread before being linked to yours! There's an SVG movement brewing it seems.

Wow! Developers' brains are really in-sync, it appears.

Ahh, OK. I remember reading about that vaguely. Coincidence I chose FB. I know Google's DOM is equally unintelligible.

Interesting that the performance of that demo is awful in fullscreen on my retina iMac in both chrome and FF; like, 3 FPS. Resizing downwards makes it run smoothly.

Ah, thanks for the info. I was imagining just manipulating it in the browser via JS; no direct export, but a re-implementation of a mock-up, perhaps.

I think it could be utilized more often for simple presentational components, such as dialogue boxes or modals, or for various bezier-piece paths.

I 'inspect-element'd some random pane on Facebook: https://imgur.com/a/qecS7gJ

...is that the title of something on the front page right now? Seriously asking; haven't checked, lol.

Seems like overkill in that case, unless you were using just because. Thanks for the additional information.

Cool! I figure now that it’s mostly used to cache (relational/made relational) datasets.

Good for you! At 14 I was hooked, and knew that this - programming, IT, technology - was for me. I can see myself in your shoes some day. The "outside world" just doesn't get the allure sometimes ;).

As a twenty-something, I'd love to work along side an "old timer". Many of the abstractions and technologies change in our field, but just as many foundational concepts stay constant. I'm sure I would learn so much.

Best of luck to you.

Really interesting but poorly written (for a scientific publication). Had a few sentences that were like “big leaps” logically. I’m no scientist but this read differently from most papers I’ve come across.

I share some of the sentiment, but only demand and necessity will drive “building”. An energized or optimistic citizenry surely helps, but to kick innovation into high gear we need a Cold War or something. A crisis where we can go outside at least - this virus really has deflated some of the American spirit it feels like. Sort of stuck in this limbo where everyone wants to rally and help but the touted best way to help is to stay inside. A lot of pent up energy in me at least; perhaps Marc is channeling a bit of his own.

How should I represent Unicode in memory?! UTF8? 16? 32bit integers? I keep hearing pros and cons of all the previous three. Is there a consensus? In cases where you don’t need a full blown Unicode lib.

So the language itself is the limiting factor, being dynamically typed. I imagine sometimes what we’d get if typescript were natively supported. People could still write JS, or add the type information which would then allow higher performance to be achieved - approaching native or Java/C# levels.

You seem to have more familiarity than me with Java :). So I guess V8 JITs some kind of p-code then? If V8 allowed full AOT comp. to the internal bytecode, then the perf would theoretically be around Java’s avg perf?

I mean to say the bytecode is the input to the JIT.

Java’s bytecode is JITted, which is a subtle distinction since there is an AOT translation step capabale of optimizations etc.

I mean they could always go the stuxnet route so to speak and nab it that way. Anyhow GNU people, looks like a nice opportunity for a LibreDome?

Will it be able to learn the universal Turing machine? We could "train" a compiler & runtime into existence. Probably too much of a correctness constraint (since the output has to be the exact result of computing the encoded program with the encoded machine).

Stop looking at your reflection - in the mirror, in panes of glass... anywhere. Seriously. Obviously, if you have to for some reason, do it but minimally. Has other benefits as well.

You can still do all that in JS, novel syntactic sugar aside.

Full disclosure: work there.

I’d say that’s an exaggeration - trying to take an objective perspective. Some users may not know a better option exists. The beige notification bar isn’t intrusive and can be closed. A significant question is whether the notifications will be able to be disabled (readily, from within the Wordpad app).