checkout how conformant QuickJS is with the modern ES standards https://test262.report/ (especially compared with other engines developed by big teams and companies behind them)
Fabrice Bellard is a genius, and I really don't like using this word.
Prodigies like him kind of scare me. I studied at the same place as where Adam Dunkels (behind e.g. uIP and Contiki, a networked OS requiring 30 KB RAM and 30 KB ROM despite a GUI) did and he was almost a mythological figure with stories of taking multiple classes at once with ease.
Yeah, I read about a cool tech and half the time he's behind it. When I learned about the rocketman flying near an airport a few weeks ago I was surprised it wasn't him testing his new rocket engine 3d printed in his basement! ;)
It is more amazing given that QuickJS is not a single feat but a cumulation of his older projects, each of them is great by itself:
- TCC [1]: Of course, QuickJS is not the first language implementation he's written.
- Pi calculation [2]: Once the world record holder (and opening the era of pi computation in commodity PCs), this surely inspired his next great invention:
- LibBF [3]: A good and small arbitrary-precision number library. I think LibBF is a byproduct of NumCalc [4], and he has probably seen a way to the full language implementation using LibBF later (the current version of NumCalc is indeed based on QuickJS, sharing the technique used in the current version of JSLinux [5]).
The wonders of Bellard never cease. Another discovery for me was that he wrote LZEXE in 1989~90 when he was 17. I remember this program from my childhood.
Fabrice Bellard is a genius, and I really don't like using this word.