TL;DRBunding and snapshotting are two different ways of packing a program for deployment. This post is a somewhat-biased overview of why snapshotting is clearly superior in many respects. I recently wrote up an explanation of Microvium snapshotting, along with this hopefully-helpful animated diagram: In short: the diagram depicts a running Microvium (JavaScript) application that is …
Today, I completed the first working version of the module system for Microvium, and I want to share some of the design considerations and the conclusions I came to. The design as it stands is the result of quite a few iterations. It’s is likely to change again in the future as we iterate on …
Recently, I started working on a bytecode compiler and virtual machine which I’ve currently called Microvium. (For those who have been following me, you’ll know I’ve also been working on a full JavaScript compiler called MetalScript for a while. MetalScript is still in progress and probably will be for some time — it’s not a …
This is just a curious edge case in node.js I came across while looking at creating the module system for microvium. The node.js documentation says: … every call to require(‘foo’) will get exactly the same object returned, if it would resolve to the same file. But this doesn’t seem entirely true. In the following code, a module …
One of the statements about MetalScript that people seemed to disagree with is the idea that it can take as long as a week to integrate a C/C++ library into a firmware project. TL;DR I’ve spent many years professionally doing both JavaScript and C/C++ firmware. In my experience, integrating and becoming familiar with a C/++ …
What does the following JavaScript mean: Hint: it’s a trick question. The answer depends on the context, as is demonstrated by the following snippet: Within the context of an async function, await is like a keyword, and the thing after await is considered to be an expression. In JavaScript, an expression that starts with forward-slash …
It’s been a while since my last update! Unfortunately, this is because there’s not a lot of observable progress to speak of. But today, here’s another update for those who are interested. I’ll preface this by saying that this update is not particularly interesting. TL;DR: my personal life has got in the way, and MetalScript …
Inspired by Eric Lippert’s recent post on a data structure called a Hughes list, I thought I’d play around with it by writing my own equivalent in JavaScript. Side note before I get started. For my usual readers who are following the progress of my JavaScript-to-native compiler (MetalScript), I’ll hopefully continue blogging about it soon. …
Those following my blog will know that I was in Boston last week for ECMA TC53. ECMA is a standards group, and TC53 is the 53rd Technical Committee, being established to produce standards for JavaScript on wearables and other resource-constrained devices. Some of you may already be familiar with TC39, who are the creators of modern JavaScript …
A MetalScript progress update, for those who are interested. This one is all boring technical details — if this is your first time on the site, perhaps read something more interesting like what MetalScript is and the reason why I’m creating it. Or for those who like technical details, read on… [Edit: Previously this had …