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Comment by josefdlange | Hacker News Reader

I love the thought of being able to use Python on the client side of the web. We need more commonplace asynchronous paradigms, however.

I do like how this project makes sure to point out that the DOM interface is intended for consumption by any language and on any platform -- maybe one day we'll have browsers that come with several languages' runtimes baked in, or perhaps that can leverage the runtimes for languages already installed on the local machine.

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> maybe one day we'll have browsers that come with several languages' runtimes baked in

Seems like you missed big announcements the last couple of weeks. Here you can get in the loop:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737055

> maybe one day we'll have browsers that come with several languages' runtimes baked in

asm.js/WebAssembly takes care of that.

I don't see how it does. You'll still have to download the language runtime (including a garbage collector for a language like Python). Perhaps it can be cached, but that's a heavy requirement for a web page, particularly on mobile.

By contrast, a language that compiles to regular JavaScript can use the GC built into JavaScript.

If I understood correctly, WebAssembly, unlike current asm.js, will be able to allocate and use GC objects.

Note: a future version of WebAssembly may be able to use the browser GC.

Yes, that's what I meant.

WebAssembly is pretty much going to be mapped to Asm.js initially. Most of the features it's getting that asm.js doesn't have yet are future asm.js features which wasm is also to be mapped too. This includes things like pthreads, SIMD and the ability to support GC languages.

>maybe one day we'll have browsers that come with several languages' runtimes baked in

More security attack vectors? No thanks.

Being able to use several languages natively does not actually mean "more security attack vectors." Nobody is asking or even talking about ActiveX. This is FUD.

Why?

More code is always more possible security attack vectors, because almost no code is provably secure.

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