Comment by pizlonator 18 hours ago
This engine restricts JS in all of the ways I wished I could restrict the language back when I was working on JSC.
You can’t restrict JS that way on the web because of compatibility. But I totally buy that restricting it this way for embedded systems will result in something that sparks joy
He already has a JS engine which doesn’t make these restrictions
Yeah QuickJS is great.
I bet MQJS will also be very popular. Quite impressive that bro is going to have two JS engines to brag about in addition to a lot of other very useful things!
> Quite impressive...
Yes, quite! Monsieur Bellard is a legend of computer programming. It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB.
Unfortunate that he doesn't seem to write publicly about how he thinks about software. I've never seen him as a guest on any podcast either.
I have long wondered who the "Charlie Gordon" who seems to collaborate with him on everything is. Googling the name brings up a young ballet dancer from England, but I doubt that's the person in question.
It would be odd, but that name does ring a bell, Charlie Gordon is the central character in the ever poignant, Flowers for Algernon.
Maybe Bellard identifies with the genius, but fears the loss of it.
These are greats in their own domains. But Fabrice Bellard's greatness lies in breadth and depth in varied domains. That is what makes him unique.
> It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB.
I am of the firm belief that "Monsieur Fabrice Bellard" is not one person but a group of programmers writing under this nom de plume like "Nicolas Bourbaki" was in Mathematics ;-)
I don't know of any other programmer who has similar breadth and depth in so many varied domains. Just look at his website - https://bellard.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard No self-aggrandizing stuff etc. but only tech. He is an ideal for all of us to strive for.
Watson's comment on how Sherlock Holmes made him feel can be rephrased in this context as;
"I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours [i.e. fellow programmers], but I was [and am] always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with [the works of Fabrice Bellard]."
PS: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer - https://web.archive.org/web/20210128085300/https://smartbear...
PPS: Fabrice Bellard: A Computer Science Pioneer - https://www.scribd.com/document/511765517/Fabrice-Bellard-In... (pretty good long article)
> You can’t restrict JS that way on the web because of compatibility.
Well, now we can run this thing in WASM and get, I imagine, sane runtime errors :)