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

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Interesting. So I can compile some Ruby or whatever to LLVM byte code, then the native client will safely run it in Chrome (and hopefully in the future in other browsers)?

Is native client stuff allowed to interact with the DOM etc, or is it just like a plugin that operates inside an object tag?

[andrewducker]

Can't find out much about DOM interaction. I was assuming you could, but now I'm not so sure.

If not then that would be an obvious next step.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

DOM interaction is the main thing here :)

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. A bit more searching turns up that DOM interaction from plugins (like Flash or Java) is slow, because it's crossing a process boundary.

So we probably want it built in. Which, let's face it, it will be if it takes off...