Why is it so hard for browsers to implement a common set of byte-code. Then we all get what we want and it would make it much simpler to port your favorite language to the browser.
This compile to javascript trend seems so brittle and frail.
This compile to javascript trend seems so brittle and frail.
Google and Mozilla are the only mainstream browser vendors that have an incentive to offer a bytecode alternative to the JavaScript status quo, whereas Apple and Microsoft would simply be undermining their respective platform positions.
This means that Mozilla could have worked with Google to form a bloc; Chrome and Firefox would have been the only browsers to support better web technology, and that might have been enough to force Microsoft and Apple's hand.
Instead, Eich stuck to his "JavaScript First" guns for years, wasting market opportunities and in the process, serving as the swing vote that held the entire web back.
I hope that the next CEO of Mozilla realizes that for platforms like Firefox OS to have a snowball's chance in hell, they need to work with Google to move past HTML/CSS/JS.
Part of the problem is that Webkit has a very narrow mission of wanting to only be standards compliant. This is really holding back innovation given how widely used it is in Safari and until recently Chrome.
It seems to me that in order to make it happen, it would need wide support from one of the major browser vendors.
- The only number representation available is floating point.
- Concurrency is impossible except for the nearly useless web workers API; this prevents a language author from exposing any other type of concurrency mechanism.
- Anyone wishing to implement the "byte code" specification must implement or integrate a full Javascript parser and runtime.