luajit VS pagoda

> No offence, but have you written any compilers or interpreters?

I have, but nothing sophisticated.

> The points that you discuss [...] may be performance concerns for application developers [...] but they have very little to do with the optimisations you can make as a compiler/interpreter writer. [...] The only one that's somewhat relevant is 'global scope by default'

I didn't mean to imply that these where the three common traits that make both Javascript and Lua particularly hard to optimize, I just picked them as examples for how Javascript and Lua are closer to each other than most other dynamic languages.

But let's dig in a bit on your claim that things like all numbers being doubles or having a array cum map cum record type has very little to do with the optimizations you can make as a compiler/interpreter writer, because it sure seems to me that LuaJIT and V8 do a bunch of optimizations around these things. Both have dual number representations under the hood and will try to avoid representing numbers that remain in the domain of 32 bit integers as double values internally when that gives performance gains. The logic for figuring out if that's the case doesn't seem to be super-straightforward or target architecture independent from looking at the comments in <https://github.com/LuaDist/luajit/blob/master/src/lj_opt_nar...>.

LuaJIT furthermore uses NaN tagging (as do some JS engines, although not V8), which looks less attractive to me as a representation strategy if your numbers are not all/mostly notional doubles (as is indeed the case in newer version of Lua where 64bit integers are the dominant number type)

Also, as far as the super-flexible lua tables are concerned, I'm pretty sure LuaJIT goes through some amount of trouble to specialize various common use cases of tables, e.g. as arrays without holes, and surprise, so does V8 (https://v8.dev/blog/fast-properties#elements-or-array-indexe...). I don't think you'd find something equivalent in a high performance scheme implementation.

> but this doesn't touch the surface of the issues that make JS hard to optimise, such as the fact that your, say, memoisation of an object property or method may be broken by an `eval` call of an arbitrary runtime value somewhere else in the code (which, due to asynchronicity, could take place at more or less any time from the point of view of your given 'peephole').

Eval belongs to a core set of features that basically all popular dynamic languages share that presents headaches for high performance implementations. How is Javascript's eval particularly problematic in this regard, and specifically much more so than Lua's loadstring/load?

More generally what do you think makes (pre-ES6) javascript significantly harder to optimize than lua 5.0?

Recently, I have stumbled across this one: https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda

I'd like to make a small plug for a really awesome Golang web development starter kit I found recently called pagoda (https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda). It wires up HTMX, together with Alpine.js and Bulma CSS, onto a really fantastic collection of Go libraries on the back end.

Well said. The 'no big framework' thing works for Go because the Go standard library defines a common way for dealing with HTTP. The difficulty, then, is identifying 3rd party packages that play well with the rest of the ecosystem.

You can see the opposite in projects like Echo, Gin, Beego, etc., that eschew the standard library to various degrees and try to build the kitchen sink themselves. Sometimes this works! Echo is very popular, despite having nonstandard handlers and context. An absolute Go newbie is probably going to have an easier time using it than trying to pick out the best collection of libraries themselves.

I would love to see more 'blessed stack' collections that tie together good libraries such as this one: https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda

The readme doesn't seem to mention or list what libraries this depends on, it has chi and jet at least based on the structs section.

Given this "framework" is predominantly a collection of other people's (usually apache/mit) work, where is the BOM/licence text including all of the dependencies?

And why has the author attempted to licence their likely sub 100 lines of glue code under the GPL?

I don't see the point in using something like this which is basically a prefilled go.mod with some other files with a pretty stock organization.

I've used Pagoda (https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda) in the past which makes a show of displaying its nature as a wrapper around a bunch of community libraries, and is documented as such. They also make effort to document the interfaces for each component so you could easily replace them with your own implementations to avoid getting stuck due to the "framework". This is my preferred approach for all of these "starters" now since using pagoda.

I recently came across https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda - which is also a very good starter kit. Unfortunately it comes with some tools I personally don't like a lot (yet) - like htmlx for templates. I suppose this is a problem of all starters - you can only build one which is ideal for you, but not for others. But anyway it's simpler to remove/replace unnecessary parts than create everything from scratch.

Pagoda looks really nice