Hacker News Reader

Comment by double051 | Hacker News Reader

Bytecode for the web always fails. Remember Java applets and Flash? The great thing about javascript is that it can be hand-written and compiled-to.

View on HN

I think the problem with Java applets and Flash was not the bytecode but the slow startup (Java) and the closed source software (Flash) as well as the poor integration with HTML. There is no reason why browsers couldn't implement the same functionality we have now with Javascript using a bytecode based VM.

Browsers do implement Javascript using a bytecode based VM - https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source/JavaScri...

It just isn't standardized, or made available to website authors directly (there would likely need to be significant extra security audits before you could contemplate something like that...).

Not all browsers do this. At least one compiles directly to native machine code. Chrome's V8 does this according to http://stackoverflow.com/a/8819921

Since you would need backwards compatability, just make an argument to script elementa that specify the byte code to use instead of the javascript. Then older browsers could continue to function and the rest of us don't have to wait.

Flash was extremely successful, and it was a really great abstraction. What failed was Adobe's implementation, not the idea.

Same with Java. JVM had (and AFAIK still has) a horrible cold startup time which locked the entire browser up, causing the user to curse profanely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com