The $9B James Webb Space Telescope Runs JavaScript

(theverge.com)

19 points | by jakey_bakey a day ago ago

11 comments

  • wormlord a day ago

    This is cool. It looks like the creator of the ScriptEase engine wrote about it here [0].

    It would be cool to see a style or testing guide to see how they prevented bugs from shipping.

    [0] https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm

    • classichasclass a day ago

      Another really wacky part is this (Nombas ScriptEase) is the same JS engine used in BeOS NetPositive. Be licensed it, though the layout engine was in-house.

  • consumer451 20 hours ago

    This reminded me about the fact that SpaceX's Dragon human-rated spacecraft uses Chromium, HTML, CSS, and JS. [0]

    I used to find this surprising. I still do, but I used to, too.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23403800

  • TheUnhinged 17 hours ago

    I wish this kind of SW was open source.

  • ninetyninenine a day ago

    I mean people bitch but I find js to be safer than C++. These kinds of things really need to use rust.

    • Koshkin a day ago

      I doubt that a dynamically typed interpreted language can be "safer" than a statically typed compiled language.

      • ninetyninenine 21 hours ago

        That's because you actually haven't used C++ that much or you haven't used js that much or both. In practice, despite the type system, it is actually less safe. There are bugs in C++ that are so subtle nobody can find it for years.

        Javascript is practically safer because each crash leaves an incredibly obvious stack trace about what caused the crash. It leads to programs with less bugs then C++.

      • Pet_Ant a day ago

        I mean if it prevents pointer arithmetic and use after free it can be.

        • Koshkin a day ago

          In C++ (specifically) one can limit oneself to using safe constructs provided by the standard library. (C is a different story, of course.)

          • xscott a day ago

            I think somebody could write a safe C++ library, but the STL hands out dangling references like candy at Halloween. It's very easy to get use-after-free problems with it.

            • Koshkin 7 hours ago

              I don't know what you are talking about. (What I meant was, the need for pointer arithmetic can be avoided by using iterators, and use-after-free, by using smart pointers.)