elk

It does exactly what you say: takes source code from the internet and put it onto your hard drive, but in a very indirect way, occasionally verbatim, in other cases it renames identifiers and does a bit of composition. I actually reported one such case: https://github.com/cesanta/elk/issues/75 The kid had no clue LLM just copied implementation from other similar project.

This project appears to be an LLM-rewritten Elk (https://github.com/cesanta/elk), as noted elsewhere in the thread. That project was established in 2019.

I code with AI all day, every day. But I do think that it's worth pointing to this issue (from March). The author has said that they've redone it since, but the "from-scratch hand-built" framing specifically – for me – somewhat grates given the original heavy lifting from an existing AGPL codebase. https://github.com/cesanta/elk/issues/75 I want to acknowledge that the original authors don't seem to have minded too much – per that thread – after older versions were dropped. For context, the current code doesn't look like it is the same shape, the same structure, etc., etc. – it _has_ been rewritten since (the 'since Feb' rewrite mentioned adjacent is related to this, AFAICT). To the author: I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks.

There are already libraries/frameworks that have supported this: * espruino (https://www.espruino.com/) * elk (https://github.com/cesanta/elk) * DeviceScript (Microsoft Research's now defunct effort, https://github.com/microsoft/devicescript)

The set of features not supported is quite extensive: https://github.com/cesanta/elk#not-supported-features * No var, no const. Use let (strict mode only) * No do, switch, for. Use while * No => functions. Use let f = function(...) {...}; * No arrays, closures, prototypes, this, new, delete * No standard library: no Date, Regexp, Function, String, Number Seems more "JS inspired" than actual JavaScript.

This implementation is nuts. A decent chunk (but still very small subset) of ES5 in a single file, under 1400 lines of very readable C code. It includes a mark-and-sweep GC and an FFI. It doesn't have an AST or a bytecode VM. It just interprets directly off of source code. Take a look: https://github.com/cesanta/elk/blob/master/elk.c. The first time I scanned through the file and thought there was nothing there. It does an entire implementation in the same amount of code that most implementations do a parser alone (but yes, it implements way less than a 100% spec compliant parser does). This implementation really sets a new bar for me in terms of compact-but-readable language implementations. Separately, this isn't even Cesanta's only embedded JavaScript implementation. They also have: https://github.com/cesanta/mjs. mjs is a bit more com