Brendan Eich on Ecma TC39, JavaScript.next, and Google Dash

I have no idea. But, the script tag in HTML, for example, allows specification of language (i.e. ", historically). It was my understanding that this was intended to permit other languages to be included in the browser, or as plugins. It was used by Microsoft for vbscript, and others along the way. I thought that was the intent of that flexibility built into HTML.

And, I noted that it was not intended for a multi-language VM ("not necessarily a single VM with many languages", to quote myself, which I guess could have been more emphatic in denying that a multi-language VM was intended; I sort of assumed everyone would consider multi-language VMs the new hotness and not something that would have been considered back in the early days of VM-based languages becoming mainstream).

I merely meant that other languages were supposed to be possible. Which makes sense. No one knew (maybe you had a gut feeling), with any confidence that JavaScript would grow up to be as capable as it has. And, the idea of a multi-language multi-paradigm VM is pretty novel stuff even now. Only in the past ten years or so have we started to see people building disparate languages on a single VM and others building VMs for the purpose of hosting widely varying languages. And, those experiments are still up in the air, as far as I can tell. The JVM does pretty well for Java-like languages, and Parrot can run dynamic languages, and LLVM is great for C/C++ and their descendants...but, push them out of their comfort zone and things get hairier and the VM probably needs to grow bigger and more like the language it is hosting. They'll probably work it all out eventually. But, I certainly don't think multi-language VMs were on the minds of the creators of HTML or the browser makers.

I'm not sure we disagree (and I would obviously have to defer to your much greater knowledge on the subject, even if we did disagree). I could have been more clear in what I was suggesting was "the original intent".

Yes, I added language= at the start, but the default was JS and I had no particular intention to support other languages using one or more VMs. I see what you mean now, though -- thanks. Hope this history helps. It's less meaningfully intentional than you thought. More like blind future-proofing.

My whole talk was about how competing browser vendors work together to standardize and evolve JS. In that light, bailing to a proprietary move like Dart is entirely relevant and not linkbait.

This is a non-technical, or really meta-technical point. Lots of JS and web standards work is about techniques for solving technical problems, hence meta.

Any well-funded company with smart people on staff can "do better" for a given point-function or language in the set of languages. On the web, such better-is-better approaches won't get traction without being adopted by multiple competing browsers.

The best way to get adoption is standardization. Forcing reverse-engineering, open-washing as if that helps competing vendors more than a little (assuming their hackers can even read the delayed-open source as a reference), fragmenting web content are all "less good" in my view.

A browser with market power can try these tactics. They may backfire, or make a messy "now you have two problems" world.

Ideally, I would like the web developer to have as much freedom as a developer for a native application - the freedom to choose a programming language and the ability to compile to a reasonably low level target for performance while still being cross-platform. Now, this somehow needs to be done without the security nightmares of ActiveX plugins. (Though, I dont see the non-security problems with a bunch of shared libraries stored on the browser. This is essentially what the OS does, and my goal is to replace the OS with the browser. Bandwidth will probably improve so that downloading libraries shouldn't be a problem and if not, the web site maintainer can still choose not to develop in a large library environment The popular ones will be cached in any case.)

You seem to be saying that the technical difficulties of doing this in a well-specified (memory and control-flow), secure and cross-platform way are intractable. Maybe this can be solved by moving the VM to a more abstract level.

I'm saying that in context of market realities, the other browsers won't use shared Google-source as the "implementation is the specification" for NaCl/Pepper, and no one can write a real NaCl/Pepper spec by which any browser could implement an independent and interoperable workalike in less than decades.

So why try if the OSes can do their own non-interoperating workalikes? (And they are already doing this, from what I hear.) If safe native code on the web is mainly for plugins, there's no problem. Plugins are OS-specific today and likely to remain so, safety or no.

Moving the Web VM to a more abstract level... hmm, sounds like JS as better compiler target over time. See also https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/.