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

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

What is compile? For languages like Java or C# that use a bytecode, there are two things that you can call "compile".

First is turning the source into platform-independent bytecode, this happens upfront.

Second is "Just in Time compilation" during execution, when the runtime needs to use a method that has not been used before, and so needs to turn the bytecode for it into something that can actually execute on whatever cpu.

I'd say that Andrew is referring to the first of these.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yes I know - I'm being facetious and saying that web developers won't put up with the faffiness of it.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Well, you'll get the choice. You can continue to use JS if you like, but people that want to use other languages (and I suspect there are A LOT of those) can use the byte code system. Think for example how many Ruby or Python web developers there are who are good with that language but not so great with JS.

There's no good reason why they shouldn't be able to write in Ruby/Python for the browser just like they do on the server end.

[figg.livejournal.com]

and yet they do already without a bytecode but compiling to javascript