> David who was at the BBC at the time suggested they use yellow balls instead
Apparently he didn’t explicitly say they should be yellow, he just said the white didn’t work, the ITF chose yellow after research and studies.
Ironically, Wimbledon was the last venue to switch to the colour, despite David influencing the decision to change it.
> In 1972 the ITF introduced
yellow tennis balls into the rules of tennis, as research had shown these balls to be more visible to television viewers. Meanwhile Wimbledon continued to use the traditional white ball, but eventually adopted yellow balls in 1986.
> In 2022 is was £1.89 a litre and spent most of the year over £1.60 a litre
Why are you choosing the 2022 energy crises as your baseline? Not only your choice was arbitary but you managed to choose the year fuel was at its highest as a reaction to the war in Ukraine.
That price was not representative or typical, it was a spike. You can see it here.
This was an intentional design decision. We wanted to make sure all the temporal types could be serialize/deserializable, but as you mentioned, you couldn't implicitly go back to the object you started with as JSON.parse doesn't support that.
Instead the onus is on the developer to re-create the correct object they need on the other side. I don't believe this is problematic because if you know you're sending a Date, DateTime, MonthDay, YearMonth type from one side, then you know what type to rebuild from the ISO string on the other. Having it be automatic could be an issue if you receive unexpected values and are now dealing with the wrong types.
I’m sorry I struggle to understand your comment, but I’ll have a go.
> Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help.
That’s literally how baseload works, look at France’s energy mix for an example, they have nuclear handle the bulk of their demand (at least the very minimum it will ever be) and renewables + transfers handle the rest, if renewables goes up they export it or lower their nuclear output (yes, their nuclear output can be modulated).
> You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope
The goal isn’t to replace the entire energy mix with Nuclear, the goal is to add enough nuclear in the mix so that we don’t need gas being generating all year round (gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7). If you added just 6GW of nuclear you’d be achieving that on some days.
The UK certainly does have continuous demand, our overall energy demand has rarely fallen below 25GW in the past couple of years. Right now gas makes up for much of that, the goal here is to replace gas with nuclear, using gas as baseload generation isn’t wise long term.
First of, the UK are investing in battery storage, there’s already a rollout of grid-level battery systems across the country*.
None of them hold capacity for longer than 2 hours before they need to start discharging. In fact, the record breaking duration is 6 hours. This is great as a short buffer, but it’s not “storage”.
To put this in perspective, last year the UK went 2 weeks without any significant wind, so a 2 hour buffer is nothing. This is why Hydrogen is still being kept as an option for long term storage.
The past year has been huge for conformance for us, not only we caught up with the top engines but we surpassed them when working on Temporal and having all tests pass for that.
We hope to wind down some of the conformance priority now and focus on performance, we need to work on a new GC, refactor some parts of the engine, and improve various areas.
The idea of a JIT has been raised and we’re not against it, but it’s not on our plans right now (because of the above), that being said there is an open discussion.
That said, today Boa has a whole team of maintainers who I’m sure will answer some questions here.
Yes the name does invoke the sense it’s a Python project but I liked it and stuck with it, I saw a Boa snake at a zoo once and knew I wanted to name my next project after it, I was also inspired by Mozilla at the time who named their projects after animals.
Speaking of Mozilla, Boa’s existence came to be because at the time I was working on Servo and wanted to include an all-rust JS engine, one didn’t really exist so I set about making one as a learning exercise, after around 2 years more joined me on that journey and today Boa is around 8 years old. It is not browser grade (although at 94.12% it is more compliant than some browser engines) but that doesn’t matter, plenty of Rust projects have found good use for it as they find it easy to embed and use, so we’re happy.
Another recent thing which we’re very proud is seeing our implementation of Temporal be used in V8 and other engines, so we’re also helping the wider ecosystem and raising all ships! (More here: https://boajs.dev/blog/2025/09/24/temporal-release)
We do hope to improve performance over the next year or so, hopefully that answers some of the Qs here.
Transmission is a real problem and just like Nuclear, we haven’t improved it in the past 30 years.
So both eastern green link projects (offering more capacity) are due to be finished in 2029, “ok” I think “but surely we’re doing some work onshore to improve the existing network in the meantime..”
> Due to ongoing project work for increased power flow from North to South across two Transmission Owner (TO) regions and the interaction of the outage plans, increased capacity across the boundary will be limited and intermittent till 2029
So basically no transmission, onshore or offshore is going to be improved until 2029, but we’re still green lighting wind farms in Scotland. I’m amazed someone has the foresight to increase generation but not transmission until now, how were these green lit in the past knowing full well this bottleneck existed.
Maybe it’s controversial, but id argue for stopping more generation until transmission or storage is sorted, otherwise curtailment is going to be even higher in the next few years.
> Even if you’ve been doing JavaScript for a while, you might be surprised to learn that setTimeout(0) is not really setTimeout(0). Instead, it could run 4 milliseconds later:
Apparently he didn’t explicitly say they should be yellow, he just said the white didn’t work, the ITF chose yellow after research and studies.
Ironically, Wimbledon was the last venue to switch to the colour, despite David influencing the decision to change it.
> In 1972 the ITF introduced yellow tennis balls into the rules of tennis, as research had shown these balls to be more visible to television viewers. Meanwhile Wimbledon continued to use the traditional white ball, but eventually adopted yellow balls in 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_ball#
https://pressurebox.com/blogs/news/why-are-tennis-balls-yell...