It's pretty interesting to see it laid out there in person years. It really is a small number (especially compared to the much larger number of bodies working on other parts of those browsers).
I'll still take umbrage with the "MIT approach over Hacker approach" comment by the OP. "Worse is better" is fairly independent of that, and I think it does do disservice not only to the academic shoulders that the modern JS engines stand on, but also the academic brains packed into most of the JS engine teams (even just starting with the backgrounds of the editors of the asm.js spec).
It's also amusing, of course, that the submitter of this article is bzbarsky, who has done amazing work for the web and whose mailing list correspondence, at least, all comes from an address ending with "@mit.edu" :)
And I don't feel one bit sorry about it. I guess I could call it Stanford(/MIT) way, but MIT is nicer, juicer target.
Also asm.js is the Worse is Better compared to PNaCl. It's simpler, it's a 'hack' of JS compiler, it's not as fast as native performance of PNaCl. But it epitome of the said approach.
C is also Worse is Better approach compared to Lisp and it had some of amazing people, work on it.
I'll still take umbrage with the "MIT approach over Hacker approach" comment by the OP. "Worse is better" is fairly independent of that, and I think it does do disservice not only to the academic shoulders that the modern JS engines stand on, but also the academic brains packed into most of the JS engine teams (even just starting with the backgrounds of the editors of the asm.js spec).
It's also amusing, of course, that the submitter of this article is bzbarsky, who has done amazing work for the web and whose mailing list correspondence, at least, all comes from an address ending with "@mit.edu" :)