andyfrank.com

I’m not big on comparing the merits of different languages. Every language I’ve used serves a good purpose for some task. So I generally pick the best language for the task at hand.

In general, though, I always tend to prefer static languages for anything but a small or quick and dirty project. Especially when its a code base I intend to maintain for some time.

I just spent the weekend refactoring Fan’s JavaScript compiler to change how I model Fan fields in JavaScript. The way I had previously done it looked like this:

// Fan
class Foo { Int x := 5 }

// JavaScript
Foo.prototype.x$get = function() { return this.x; }
Foo.prototype.x$set = function(val) { this.x = val; }
Foo.prototype.x = 5;

Which isn’t great, but didn’t really have alot of options. But it seemed nice enough. It grouped the accessors and storage neatly together. And in most cases, since I can access the storage directly, the code overall was fairly clean.

Unfortunately that model made it very difficult to make certain use cases of fields and methods work (like overriding a const field with a method). So I changed the JavaScript to look like this:

// Fan
class Foo { Int x := 5 }

// JavaScript
Foo.prototype.x = function() { return this.m_x; }
Foo.prototype.x$ = function(val) { this.m_x = val; }
Foo.prototype.m_x = 5;

That change would have been a bit painful in any language, since there was just alot of code to update (the sys library and all the native implementations are written directly in JavaScript).

However, since JavaScript does not have static type checking, I pretty much had to tackle errors one-by-one using the test suite and Fresco (the web UI I’m developing at SkyFoundry).

This is probably the biggest reason I prefer static languages. When you have to make sweeping changes on a large code base, you simply can’t verify your changes 100% in any language. But a compiler with static type checking can help you tremendously. Especially for code that is difficult to unit test, like UIs.

While working on 64-bit integer support in Javascript for Fan, I ran across a blurb about bit shift performance of Numbers. The basic gist was, since Javascript has to convert the number to an integer, perform the op, then convert back, multiplying or dividing by a power of two should be as fast, or faster. On the surface that might make sense, but I wanted to see for myself, so I hacked up a very naive test case:

var x = 0xffff;

var s = new Date().getTime();
for (var i=0; i<100000; i++) x = x >> 2;
var e = new Date().getTime();
var res1 = (e-s);

s = new Date().getTime();
for (var i=0; i<100000; i++) x = x / 4;
e = new Date().getTime();
var res2 = (e-s); 

alert(">> " + res1 + "ms\n" + "/  " + res2 + "ms");

Very unscientific results:

Browser               >> 2    / 4
--------------------  ------  -------
Chrome 2.0.172.31     2-3ms   4-7ms
Firefox 3.0.11 (win)  11ms    15-16ms
Safari 3.1 (win)      15ms    15ms
IE8                   63ms    62-78ms
Opera 9.64 (win)      46ms    63ms

Interesting to see the different performance b/w browsers, but also seems clear, overall, the bit-shift operators perform slightly better even with the box/unbox hit.

I ran into an issue where I really needed to tag the built-in Javascript types with additional information to make Fan work better.  The big one is annotating a Number to be either a Int or Float, which you need to do to make all the equality checks work consistently (since 5 != 5f).

This is was my first attempt, which I assumed would work:

>>> var x = 15;
>>> x.$fanType = sys_Type.find("sys::Int");
>>> x.$fanType
undefined

But no dice.  After a bit of googling, I found this page, which says in order to add properties to the built-in types, you must create objects using the constructor syntax:

>>> var x = new Number(15);
>>> x.$fanType = sys_Type.find("sys::Int");
>>> x.$fanType
"sys::Int"

I assume this a performance optimization, where you can use a primitive int value in the first case, and have to allocate an object in the latter. Though since Javascript is a pure-OO language, I would be interested in seeing how VMs actually implement this behavoir.

Edit 8 Jun 09: Just realized using the object syntax breaks equality checks for numbers:

>>> var x = new Number(4);
>>> var y = new Number(4);
>>> x == y
false

Which sort of sucks, but you can work around it using valueOf, but still annoying.

>>> x.valueOf() == y.valueOf()
true