Am I missing something, or did we all have a browser bytecode standard that everyone hopped on board with, and it turned out nobody really liked feeding browsers compiled programs after all?
Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
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Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#52Am I missing something, or did we all have a browser bytecode standard that everyone hopped on board with, and it turned out nobody really liked feeding browsers compiled programs after all?
It was never integrated into the DOM, though, was it? I am only aware of it being used in a separate, sandboxed area on the page, unable to interact with anything else except in a very limited way. (Never mind the slow loading time etc)
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#53[deleted]
Is JS a good bytecode? Is compiling to it from Java about as efficient as compiling to a bytecode would be? If so (within an order of magnitude, I'm not fussy), then that's awesome - I hadn't realised that things were so efficient.
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-E...
summary version - there's not a lot to be gained by doing that(at least from a Goog perspective).
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find Javascript depressing. If it had a few more years to develop, it could have been a really great language. I understand why it wound up that way, but, sigh. If you want to see a much better language with the same general design, look at Lua. It's made for scripting C programs rather than web pages, and it has had over a decade longer to mature.
Why do you find it depressing? I'm not saying that there aren't better programming languages than Javascript. I'm just saying that there is a subset of Javascript which is really expressive and elegant.
I'm not a web developer, but every time I read/use Javascript, it feels like a broken fork of my favorite language. Javascript could have been that good, too. I like where Eich was going with it, but the browser wars etc. meant that shipping an early version made the most business sense, and design errors (which would have shaken out) got frozen in the spec.
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#55Am I missing something, or did we all have a browser bytecode standard that everyone hopped on board with, and it turned out nobody really liked feeding browsers compiled programs after all?
It was never integrated into the DOM, though, was it? I am only aware of it being used in a separate, sandboxed area on the page, unable to interact with anything else except in a very limited way. (Never mind the slow loading time etc)
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#56Am I missing something, or did we all have a browser bytecode standard that everyone hopped on board with, and it turned out nobody really liked feeding browsers compiled programs after all?
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find Javascript depressing. If it had a few more years to develop, it could have been a really great language. I understand why it wound up that way, but, sigh. If you want to see a much better language with the same general design, look at Lua. It's made for scripting C programs rather than web pages, and it has had over a decade longer to mature.
JavaScript was released in 1995 as part of Netscape Navigator 2.0. Lua was released in 1993. I don't know about a decade .
"One thing Mike [Pall] didn't highlight: get a simpler language. Lua is much simpler than JS." - Brendan Eich (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57671)
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was never integrated into the DOM, though, was it? I am only aware of it being used in a separate, sandboxed area on the page, unable to interact with anything else except in a very limited way. (Never mind the slow loading time etc)
Have you not done the [java applet DOM] Google search, or is every link on the first SERP wrong in some way?
So it seems that it is hardly an alternative.
> ...or is every link on the first SERP wrong in some way?
What I don't expect to find quickly is exactly how long this has been possible in which browsers since when. Was it possible back in the days of IE4 and Netscape 4 or 4.5 or whatever it was?
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#59As for previous bytecode approaches to consider, there are the Lisp Machines, or the Burroughs B5000 Algol box, or the EFI byte code (EBC) interpreter and the EBC I/O drivers, or UCSD pCode, or all the gonzo things you could do with the VAX User Writable Control Store, the JITs underneath Java and Lua and other languages, or...
And HTTP is printable, which means you're working within character-encoding constraints or with escapements.
There are the not-inconsequential security requirements.
And then there's the question of how a provider might make money with this, if you're not undertaking this effort for free.
Have at...
Re: Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
#60Before speculating too much about "a bytecode standard", etc., it would probably be helpful to understand virtual machines and instruction sets. I know web programmers generally aren't big on assembly or writing virtual machines, but an instruction set (group of bytecodes) design and implementation predisposes a processor/VM to certain operations. A VM for an OO language is going to have bytecodes (and other infrastr…