Comment by ea016

19 hours ago

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

11 comments

ea016

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arendtio  16 hours ago

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...

  • tombert  14 hours ago

    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.

    • avaer  11 hours ago

      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".

      1 reply →

    • umvi  12 hours ago

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

    • keepamovin  10 hours ago

      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.

  • anthk  6 hours ago

    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.