3 ms·
What do you think they should have done actually? What I said: make the fastest JS VM in the world years before others got started and make it cheap to call in
by gruseom 16y ago
What do you think they should have done actually?
What I said: make the fastest JS VM in the world years before others got started and make it cheap to call into from the browser. Then web apps could have used Flash's JS if it were available and just run more slowly if it weren't. Since V8 runs far faster than AS3 (in any measurement I've done), this was obviously technically possible. Had Adobe done this, Flash's extraordinary ubiquity would have meant we had access to something like V8 in nearly every browser out there, right down to IE6. Instead, what they produced was a dead end -- faster than the old JS implementations but not as fast as the new ones -- and a monstrosity called ExternalInterface that makes interaction between JS and AVM2 too slow for all but the most expensive computations.
- acqq 16y ago> make the fastest JS VM > ExternalInterface that makes interaction between JS and AVM2 So how were they to have a JS VM without the overheads but not making a full browser? Note that Google doesn't manage that either, they just have the thing that inserts the whole Chrome window in the IE frame. (The examples or specifics for each your claim are still missing).
- gruseom 16y agoThey could have started by not translating every single ExternalInterface call into XML and then back again. However, this is a useless argument: my thoughts are just a silly thought experiment and you're just being adversarial. Tell you what, have a free point on me.
- BrendanEich 16y agogruseom's what-if sounds a lot like my ScreamingMonkey plan of 2007: http://brendaneich.com/2007/07/new-projects/ http://brendaneich.com/2007/07/new-projects/ https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey The idea was for Tamarin to be as fast as V8 on untyped JS, and (via the Flash vector) distributed and integrated with all IE versions via the COM ActiveScripting interfaces to the native DOM and browser objects. This was harder than it sounds. Tamarin was not fast on untyped code and the work to make it so never happened. We at Mozilla paid Mark Hammond to do the COM integration with IE, but he ran into global object API mismatches and couldn't make progress without help from Adobe. ES4 failed and Adobe departed. ChromeFrame is really a super-ScreamingMonkey, but will it get distribution on the scale that Flash has? If it did, I bet authors would target it. With IE9 there's less need for it, but IE8 on Windows XP seems likely to be the "new IE6". I suspect something different will happen from the best laid plans of Alex et al. for ChromeFrame, just as our ScreamingMonkey dreams died. Either Microsoft will manage to move people off of XP, or other browsers will convert most XP users to switch from IE8, or something I can't foresee, but not ChromeFrame ubiquity, will happen.