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]

As I said upthread, Javascript probably isn't expressive and powerful enough, but I don't see how your new thing is going to avoid the standard-defining/implementing processes that have bollixed Javascript up. If you do have some new way to avoid the bollixisation of web standards, then simply apply this process to fixing Javascript.

[andrewducker]

Well, things seem to be progressing better now, with HTML5, than they have in the past. And according to Mr Bisson here it sounds like the major reason for not improving JS greatly is that it would break old code.

Starting over might just be easier than trying to improve JS.

(Or it might lead to ten years in committees arguing over it.)

[andrewducker]

Aha! Looks like Chrome's Native Client stuff might be what I'm looking for. It's LLVM based, and Mono now supports that as a back-end, as do lots of other languages. That'd make me happy.

Of course, it'd need to get picked up as a standard first...

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Javascript can't be fixed without breaking existing javascript code. It was like that from the start.