I was SO excited when I first read this article, as I was at the time implementing shared-global multithreading in a fork of JS Interpreter [1][2] and it was thrilling to think that we might one day have true parallelism in a real JS engine, not just simulated concurrency in our educational toy.
Since then I've often wondered if anyone at Apple was still working on this, or if it was just one of those things (like proper tail call support in V8) that was destined never to see the light of day.
A year or so ago I tried tracking it down again (apparently I'd not bookmarked it at the time) but alas several search engines responded only with a sea of articles about web workers.
Finally, last week I put Gemini on the case and, despite it claiming that it didn't exist and that I must be conflating memories of some other related articles it did correctly identify you as the author, after which it was easy to find the link to the original article on your blog.
Since re-reading it I've been wondering if it might be possible to implement it with help from AI (not having written any C++ since before the turn of the century I don't think I'd be too successful doing it unassisted!), or whether JSC's internals might have drifted too far in the intervening years.
It's delightful that someone else has take a stab at it, and I look forward to seeing where this leads.
Thanks for all the work you did laying the groundwork that made it feasible to even contemplate, then contemplating all tricky details and writing the answers down in the form of such an inspiring article.
On the one hand, if you grew up in the baazzar, moving to the cathedral might feel like the "death of open source" even if it is really just a return to an earlier way of working.
On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.
I am completely confused about the orbital mechanics in this game. They seem completely broken; at any rate they do not work remotely like any other simulation I've played with (e.g. Gravitation or Kerbal Space Program). The bodies other than the first body appear to actively deflect the spacecraft away!
I have various ill-informed hypotheses, mostly connected to the cult of shareholder value and the decades of short-termism that have resulted. As the author notes: MBAs are not inclined to take big creative risks—but, equally, are would-be Roys not inevitaby likely to be put off the whole enterprise, when whatever they might build must thread an ever-narrower path between failure followed by bankruptcy on the one hand and succeeding sufficiently to become a meal for some huge soulless multnational conglomerate (or evolving in to one) on the other?
Unless one is able to build something without needing to take outside capital, it seems inevitable that anyone willing to take true creative riskes will eventually be pushed out–and by corollary any true successes are unlikely to survive the succession of their original founders unscathed.
This reminds me of an interesting security incident that occurred on the undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca unix cluster while I was an undergrad, circa 1996.
When I'd started, the cluster had three SunOS servers, named cayley, descartes, and napier; undergrad math students had their home directory allocated on a local disk on one of these three machines, which each cross-mounted the others' via NFS. At this time, however, the Math Faculty Computing Facility had just received a fancy new dedicated NFS file server from (IIRC) NetApp, and all our home directories had been moved there instead, presumably freeing up desperately-needed CPU cycles on the three compute servers so we could run the Modula-3 and μC++ compilers.
One evening I was in one of the XTerm labs in the Math and Computer centre working on a CS assignment (the only alternative being to do from my dorm room via 2400 buad dialup). As was tradition, I had left the assignment until the night before it was due to start work on. Indeed, it seems that we all must have, because after getting part way through I needed to access some input data files that were shared from the home directory of the course account—something like ~csXYZ/assignments/N/input—only to find I could not read them.
These files were of course owned by the csXYZ course account and should have been either world-readable or readable by the corresponding csXYZ group to which all students registered that term belonged. Unfortunately something had gone wrong, and although the files were rw-r-----, they belonged to the wrong group, so that I and the other students in the class were not able to access them.
It now being after 6pm there was no hope of tracking down one of the course professors or the tutor to rectify this before morning (and it's quite likley the assignment submission deadline was 9am).
Fortunately, I was a naive and ignorant undergrad student, and not knowing what should and should not have been possible I began to think about how I might obtain access to the needed files.
I knew about suid and sgid binaries, and knew that on these modern SunOS 4 machines you could also have suid and sgid script, so I created a script to cat the needed files, then changed its group to match that to which the files belonged, then tried to chmod g+s the script—but of course this (correctly) failed with a message informing that I could not make my file sgid if I didn't belong to the group in question. I then took a different tack: I chgrped the script back to a gropu I did belong to, ran chmod g+s, then chgrped the script back to the group that owned the files I wanted to read.
I now know that this should have resulted in the script losing its setgid bit, but at the time I was unaware of the expected behaviour—and it seemed that the computer was as ignorant as I was because it duly changed the group as requested without resetting the setgid bit, and I was able to run the script, obtain the files I needed, and finish the assignment.
I then headed over to the CS Club office to discuss what had happened, because I was somewhat surprised this had worked and I wanted to understand why, and I knew that despite the lateness of the hour the office would certainly be open and very likely contain someone more expert than I who would be able to explain.
The office was indeed open but no explanation was forthcoming; instead, I was admonished not to discuss this security hole with anyone until I had reported it, in person, to the system administrators.
Thus it was that bright and early the next morning I found myself in Bill Ince's office with a printout of the terminal history containing a demonstration of the exploit in hand. I informed him I had a security issue to report, and handed him the printout.
He scanned the paper for a moment or two, and then replied simply "ahh, you found it".
It seems I was not the first to report the issue, and he explained that it was due to a bug in the new NetApp file server. He then turned monitor of the terminal on his desk around to show me a long list of filenames scrolling by, and (in hindsight rather unwisely) informed me that it was displaying a list of files that were vulnerable to being WRITTEN to due to the same hole.
He duly swore me to secrecy until the issue could be resolved by NetApp (which it was a few days later), thanked me, and sent me on my way.
Seems interesting but for some reason on Chrome on my iPhone 13 mini the page is too big for the screen: I have to pinch zoom out to see the X that dismisses the instructions, and can't scroll the about page.
Did you make some assumptions about the minimum window / screen size based on oversized modern smartphones, forgetting that lots of us still cling to more reasonably sized older devices?
You know what else is infuriating? Pages that won't load (at all—just show a blank page, or in this case a too many redirects error—if you do not have cookies and local storage enabled.
Since then I've often wondered if anyone at Apple was still working on this, or if it was just one of those things (like proper tail call support in V8) that was destined never to see the light of day.
A year or so ago I tried tracking it down again (apparently I'd not bookmarked it at the time) but alas several search engines responded only with a sea of articles about web workers.
Finally, last week I put Gemini on the case and, despite it claiming that it didn't exist and that I must be conflating memories of some other related articles it did correctly identify you as the author, after which it was easy to find the link to the original article on your blog.
Since re-reading it I've been wondering if it might be possible to implement it with help from AI (not having written any C++ since before the turn of the century I don't think I'd be too successful doing it unassisted!), or whether JSC's internals might have drifted too far in the intervening years.
It's delightful that someone else has take a stab at it, and I look forward to seeing where this leads.
Thanks for all the work you did laying the groundwork that made it feasible to even contemplate, then contemplating all tricky details and writing the answers down in the form of such an inspiring article.
[1] https://github.com/NeilFraser/JS-Interpreter [2] https://github.com/google/CodeCity/blob/fa1bd2734b806559ffaf...