Apple is doing some really interesting but really quiet work in the area of VMs. I feel like we don’t give them enough credit but maybe they’ve put themselves in that position by not bragging enough about what they do.
As a somewhat related aside, I have been watching Bun (low startup time Node-like on top of Safari’s JavaScript engine) with enough interest that I started trying to fix a bug, which is somewhat unusual for me. I mostly contribute small fixes to tools I use at work. I can’t quite grok Zig code yet so I got stuck fairly quickly. The “bug” turned out to be default behavior in a Zig stdlib, rather than in JavaScript code. The rest is fairly tangential but suffice it to say I prefer self hosted languages but this probably falls into the startup speed compromise.
Being low startup overhead makes their VM interesting, but the fact that it benchmarks better than Firefox a lot of the time and occasionally faster than v8 is quite a bit of quiet competence.
Exactly. As someone who would be very interested in this, but don't use Apple products, it's just not exciting because it's not accessible to me (I can't even test it as a user). If they wanted to write a whitepaper about it to share knowledge, that might be interesting, but given that it's Apple I'm not gonna hold my breath.
As a somewhat related aside, I have been watching Bun (low startup time Node-like on top of Safari’s JavaScript engine) with enough interest that I started trying to fix a bug, which is somewhat unusual for me. I mostly contribute small fixes to tools I use at work. I can’t quite grok Zig code yet so I got stuck fairly quickly. The “bug” turned out to be default behavior in a Zig stdlib, rather than in JavaScript code. The rest is fairly tangential but suffice it to say I prefer self hosted languages but this probably falls into the startup speed compromise.
Being low startup overhead makes their VM interesting, but the fact that it benchmarks better than Firefox a lot of the time and occasionally faster than v8 is quite a bit of quiet competence.