Coding in web browsers

[andrewducker]

robhu has a good point over here.

At the moment we write Javascript in web pages, which is then compiled down by the various JIT methods that Firefox/IE/Webkit use to make it super fast.

Seeing as what's run clearly isn't the actual JS itself, but bytecode, why not have a standardised bytecode that all browsers would support, which would then mean you could write your code in any language you liked, providing there was a compiler to convert it to the standardised bytecode?

At the moment Google uses GWT to convert Java into Javascript that then gets converted into the running code, (And MS used to have something similar) wouldn't it be handy if the intermediate step wasn't necessary?

Comments

[drplokta]

Actually, I believe that C code tends to be faster than assembly these days, because the compiler is better than you are at ordering opcodes to take best advantage of modern CPU architectures and allow simultaneous execution of instructions in nominally single-threaded code while minimising waits.

[andrewducker]

Yes - I'd be surprised if it was worth handcrafting assembly more than once in a blue moon, especially if you're running on multiple generations of processors.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

In general, absolutely. Certainly on a modern superscalar CPU. But in the DSP space, assembly programmers have the edge when they have sufficient time to spend on an inner loop (and they're allowed to make assumptions that compilers aren't)

[jouni osmala (from livejournal.com)]

In 90's the assembly programming book simply stated, that if you hand translate your C code to assembler you loose. But if you solve the problem directly in assembler you could get ~6X performance improvement.
Another thing to consider is that assembler really requires LOTS of knowledge to actually be better than writing same in C.
Assembly acts as a leverage of your knowledge base, by giving you direct control over constraints that you do not have access to in C.
The amount of knowledge required for assembly to win over C is couple thousand pages worth of knowledge that isn't much use outside assembler programming how many programmers have read it?