The Absurdity of JavaScript Device Drivers
Description
A parody of a classic O'Reilly technical book cover. The cover has the signature white background with a bold red banner at the top containing the title: 'Writing Device Drivers with JavaScript'. Above the title, in a smaller font, is the sarcastic subtitle, 'Good luck with that'. Instead of the usual intricate animal line drawing, the cover features a bizarre and comical black-and-white illustration of a very large, black-and-white spotted bull-like animal attempting to mount a much smaller horse. At the bottom are the 'O'REILLY' logo and the name 'David Flanagan' (a real O'Reilly author). This meme is a sharp satire on the 'JavaScript everywhere' trend, humorously pointing out the language's unsuitability for low-level systems programming like writing device drivers, which requires direct memory and hardware access typically found in languages like C or Assembly. The absurd animal pairing visually represents this profound technical mismatch, making it instantly funny to any experienced engineer
Comments
7Comment deleted
I tried to write a device driver in JavaScript. The garbage collector caused a race condition with the interrupt handler and now my toaster only makes promises
Nothing says “real-time” like a JavaScript PCIe driver - IRQ fires, we await setImmediate, GC reclaims the DMA buffer, and in the post-mortem we just call it “event-driven I/O.”
The sequel covers implementing interrupt handlers with async/await and managing DMA transfers through npm packages, with a foreword by the engineer who suggested Electron for the Mars rover
Ah yes, writing device drivers in JavaScript - because nothing says 'deterministic real-time performance' and 'direct memory access' quite like an event-loop-based, garbage-collected language that was originally designed to validate form fields. I'm sure the kernel will love those async/await calls when handling hardware interrupts at microsecond precision. At least when it inevitably crashes, you can console.log() your way through the postmortem... oh wait
Good luck debugging USB interrupts with console.log when the GC decides to pause your ISR
Device drivers in JavaScript - nothing says “hard real-time” like an interrupt handler that awaits a Promise and gets preempted by GC
Sure, let’s ACK an interrupt by returning a Promise - nothing says predictable ISR latency like a stop‑the‑world GC negotiating with ring 0