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

Native Client

[http://www.google.com/profiles/albzey (from livejournal.com)]

Exactly this exists already. Check out this:
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

It probably will use LLVM bytecode at some point (I think it already supports that). Atm., it executes x86.

The hard part is the sandboxing. But it seems they have done well on this in the Natice Client.

Re: Native Client

[andrewducker]

Yup, thanks. I hope it gets picked up by other browsers.