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Comment by dherman | Hacker News Reader

What you're asking for is drastically harder to achieve from a security perspective. If we didn't care about security, we could just standard the Linux syscalls or something and call it a day. :) But what we're doing here is providing the low-level computational model but still only providing attenuated access to system facilities like the network through standardized web API's.

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I would not say 'drastically'. I guess arguments from the monolithic vs microkernel discussion can be recycled. Basically, security is one of the main arguments for the latter [1] and a lot of OSs that require high security are in fact microkernels. But yeah, implementing the Linux API in the browser does in fact sound like a rather sub-par idea but I was not arguing for that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel#Security

In any other context, would you argue with the guy who has to actually /do/ something, about how hard it will be?

Oh this programming thing looks easy. all you're doing is typing words into the computer. What's the big deal?

I did not say that it would be simple, it would be pretty hard actually. The question is, whether it is worthwhile for people to be investing so much time to make something do something it was not intended to do (I'm not talking just about asm.js but about all the other languages and tools that target JS as well. I feel like these don't really add anything new to the table). And the question is also not whether it is hard or not but whether it is hard compared to similar projects. For example, I'm not convinced that it would be any harder than building a new browser (again I realize that this is super hard, but I'm speaking comparatively).

As to arguing, I prefer the word 'debating'. Also I was under the impression that that is what comments were for. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You have to define what you mean by "intent" for that to make any sense. Here is Dave Herman, one of the authors of javascript, telling you here is asm.js. you can use compilers to compile to it. Is that not intendy enough for you?

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