Joined 14 years ago
Even if you found some way to get some other language into the browser without translating to javascript; (and this has been done before. remember vbscript?)... the new guest language has to co-exist with any javascript that might also run on the page, share the same memory, share the same dom objects, share the same GC, and avoid all the multiple potential nasty browser crashing bugs that could result from trying to do that. And you have to ship the runtime for that language along with the browser, or as sigh another plugin. And guess what, no backwards compatibility.
Given that, you then have to cope with the fact that javascript's GC might not totally make sense for your language, and do all the workarounds that requires.
Compiling to ASM.js gets around this by essentially giving you a low level VM whose bytecode just happens to look like javascript, and whose behavior when interpreted as javascript happens to be correct. When run in firefox, the code is short circuited and ahead-of-time compiled. It doesn't have to deal with the javascript GC since it allocates a heap for the guest program ahead of time as well.
This is really cool if you think about it. You get javascript's more or less secure sandboxing, you get access to all the apis, you can interact just fine with existing javascript libraries, with about the lowest amount of overhead you can get just short of the NaCl approach (which is basically just a revisit of activeX)
The only downside to all this:
it's not the web.
This is not web. It runs in a web browser, but it's downloading a blob up front, ahead of time compiling, and playing a raw executable inside a browser host.
There's considerable advantages to zero-install programs and games. But you know, exchanging one kind of opaque inaccessible blob in a webpage for a different kind that just happens to not need plugins is not that great.
Accessibility is a good thing, and we shouldn't be too eager to throw it away for the shiny.
it was going just fine until apple disabled it in iOS7
but despite that setback, google continues to bank its entire business on offline web apps.
It's the increasingly complicated DOM, and CSS3 layout model.
Web Apps go slow, and this gets blamed on javascript because that's the language you happen to be writing in. (or wronging in). But the slowness you get usually comes from the constant triggering and retriggering of giant byzantine relayout and compositing algorithms from what you might think is reasonably written code.
it's THAT problem that facebook's react library is aimed at... fixing? no, reducing. Write reasonable JS, and let the library optimise DOM interactions.
Every new feature of HTML5 and CSS adds some weight to those enormous piles of sand the browser has to shift around.
Binary formats would not fix that. Bytecodes wouldn't fix that. Different languages wouldn't fix that. Javascript is fine. it's the DOM and CSS that need to be fixed.
1. a prewritten engine, and
2. some hypothetical language
each where you write commander keen with 3k loc. Where the hypothetical language has all the same stuff as the engine, it's just locked away behind a level of abstraction.
if you could write commander keen in 3k of javascript (with the aid of all the stuff that's in a browser) How is that different from writing 3k of C with nothing but this entire commander keen engine already written and ready to go?
What's are we calling an "advance", exactly?
Nowadays you see, it's wasteful to write an engine from scratch for a game like this. It was needed then, but it's a solved problem now. If you wrote 33k for a commander keen clone I'd wonder what you were doing.
The idea I had was extending ansi codes to contain specific instructions for NES graphics hardware, along with a special NES rom that could decode them from say, some audio signal via the microphone port, or controller port 2 keys, or whatever input is most convenient.
Such an ansi protocol extension would include things like sprite graphics, tile graphics, sprite positions, in addition to the normal character mode telnet stuff that maps naturally to the NES's tile based background graphics.
That would be pretty neat.
It would let you put a modem attachment on an NES and dial into a server to play games remotely. Such games could even be multiplayer by nature, with a centralised server infrastructure kind of thing.
You can steal it now if you want. I'm not likely to act on it any time soon.
fixed.
