The choice of Duktape here is smart — it's one of the few JS engines that can actually run freestanding with minimal libc stubs, since it was designed for embedding in constrained environments. V8 or SpiderMonkey would be a nightmare to get running pre-boot.

What I find most interesting is the UEFI services binding approach. Rather than trying to abstract away the hardware, it exposes the raw EFI protocols (GraphicsOutput, SimpleFileSystem, etc.) directly to JS. That's a much more pragmatic design than trying to build a full HAL — you get to prototype UEFI applications rapidly while keeping the escape hatch to C for anything performance-critical.

Would love to see if anyone tries hooking this into UEFI's built-in network stack for PXE boot scripting. That could actually be useful beyond the novelty factor.

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written-beyond 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Are em-dashes really that common to use or did I just start noticing them after LLMs became popular for rewriting comments?

Not implying your comment is LLM generated, clearly it isn't but asking as a genuine question.

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Kerrick 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Pretty dang common. OS X and macOS (and maybe iOS and iPadOS, though I'm not certain) have been autocorrecting "--" into "—" for over a decade. Windows users have been using Alt codes for them since approximately forever ago: https://superuser.com/q/811318.

Typography nerds, which are likely overrepresented on HN, love both em dash and en dash, and we especially love knowing when to use each. Punctation geeks, too! If you know what an octothorp or an interrobang are, you've probably been using em dashes for a long time.

Folks who didn't know what an em dash was by name are now experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon en masse. I've literally had to disable my "--" autocorrect just to not be accused of using an LLM when writing. It's annoying.

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geocar 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

⌥- produces a – as well. That's sometimes easier than typing `--` and hoping for the best.

	▲	ziml77 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's an en-dash. You want to also hold shift to make it an em-dash.

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xp84 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It really is. We dash-users are the real and most important victims of the AI revolution. I hope someday our story will be told (by the machines)