Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

And to be clear, I'm speaking from a position where I think too much stuff has been added to JS that doesn't need to be there. Again, not coincidentally, largely because of Google. I *want* a more restricted set of stuff in the language core.

But *what* this presentation proposes as the things to split off, is extremely telling about what their true intentions are, and I absolutely do not believe that they are good for anyone but Google.

A non-exhaustive list of things where having BigInts at your disposal (as opposed to floats) is really quite helpful and/or necessary:

- Cryptography
- Database development
- Fixed-precision decimals (you know, like working with amounts of money...)
- Parsers and protocol handlers
- Internal state tracking

Regarding this: https://devclass.com/2024/10/22/should-javascript-be-split-into-two-languages-new-google-driven-proposal-divides-opinion/

It's important to remember that when Google says "the usecases have not materialized", what they *mean* is "we do not have a usecase for this".

BigInts have, in fact, seen widespread use in applications that would otherwise be very difficult to implement correctly, just most of them do not run in a browser, and so Google doesn't give a shit about them.

I do not trust this proposal one bit. This whole thing is primarily going to benefit those with a well-established developer tooling division, which not coincidentally includes Google.

I suspect that this doesn't really need to be said around here, but given that the same people are apparently still waffling on loudly in the usual places about how the folks forking Nix are "bullying project leadership":

Read their claims carefully and check if they mention anything, literally *anything at all*, about the community dynamics prior to the Nix fork, and how those relate to the fork happening, ie. the history of the past 10 years or so. That should tell you roughly how much of the story they are actually leaving out.

Don't think there's really much more to say on the topic that isn't a colossal waste of time, to be honest.

"Forking" as we know it today really just doesn't achieve its stated goal, and is trapped in the ideology of pseudo-meritocracy; the concept really needs a lot more development to be useful, and it's not a serious option for resolving governance problems today, even as a last resort (but still the only one we have).

The current model of how "forking" is supposed to work, completely ignores natural network effects, startup cost, power imbalances, sponsorship agreements, and a whole lot of other things that are necessary to account for to successfully diverge a project.