Comment by simonw
16 hours ago
> I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast
Coding agents. They landed 918,000 lines of code in a single week: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/graphs/contributors?s...
16 hours ago
> I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast
Coding agents. They landed 918,000 lines of code in a single week: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/graphs/contributors?s...
Christ. Imagine if bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cars, airplanes were designed and built like that.
I vibeslopped thousands of pages of blueprints, nobody reviewed them, but another team of digital monkeys with the intellect of an ant have already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
I can't imagine actual engineers feeling anything but deepest contempt for this industry.
"Actual engineers" don't really care about software engineering, much less a strong emotion at all like the "deepest contempt" and many of them already vibe code today for their work anyway.
Oh no, we do, because the software world has been abusing what engineering means for decades, in order to inflate job titles. Most people are programmers, not software engineers, and that's OK.
6 replies →
as long as they stay away from boeing or anything that flies...
> already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
“Actual” engineering went through a phase where bridges and other structures did collapse due to structural flaws - it’s not like they magically figured out ahead of time how to avoid that.
Now, they can build structures that are some specified tolerance away from collapsing, but that’s only the case because the edges of what was possible were explored.
They landed 802,000 lines of code in a single commit: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/23d5918a5381e0...
This is not the Vercel ad they think it is.
That makes sense. It also seems like this uses a lot more dependencies and tiers of compilation whereas Porforr is trying to do everything from scratch.
900k lines of code plus tons of deps for a compiler? Does that really make sense to you?
It's coming from Vercel, what do you expect?
I don't actually see any dependencies other than node and typescript (and the optional quickjs package) (maybe they inlined dependencies? But the package.json files don't indicate any npm dependencies)
That explains why:
- the architecture is idiotic.
- they have zero credible perf numbers.
I plan to benchmark it using generally accepted methods.
Porffor makes careful trade offs that make sense and is benchmarked in a way that I can believe.
(Source: I make dynamic languages fast for a living)
Putting aside the whole “team of professionals putting out a product vs solo dev fine tuning their opus” of it all:
Can you clarify what about the architecture is ‘idiotic’? Not trying to catch you or demand a defense, just looking for a vague description. I don’t even know how to start examining the architecture of something like this.
Yeah
- using quickjs at all in a thing that needs perf. Quickjs is hilariously slow. Midwits use it because it has “quick” in the name.
- using floats for numbers and deferring int optimizations for later. Inferring ints is like half the problem of fast JS.
- rejecting inadequately annotated or too dynamic code without a whole heck of a lot of self-reflection about how unlikely that is to work out.
The observation that languages that are even slightly dynamic need dynamic JIT opts is very old; folks figured that out in the 80s.
This project reeks of weapons grade AI psychosis
18 replies →
Just randomly:
1. TS only has a "number" type. But what type of number is it? This is doable safely via keywords (or known markers), or sometimes via analysis, but I couldn't find it in the README.
2. A compiler that works only on macOS?