5 ms·

I have half-a-mind to hack LuaJIT into Webkit I've been thinking for a while that Lua and especially LuaJIT are so good that there might exist a strategy to do

by gruseom 14y ago

I have half-a-mind to hack LuaJIT into Webkit I've been thinking for a while that Lua and especially LuaJIT are so good that there might exist a strategy to do an end run around vendors and get LuaJIT into browsers as (initially) a plug-in. It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in.

azakai 14y ago
> I've been thinking for a while that Lua and especially LuaJIT are so good that there might exist a strategy to do an end run around vendors and get LuaJIT into browsers as (initially) a plug-in. It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in. Please don't create yet another plugin. Plugins are bad for the web, they fragment it and if they end up de-facto standards that causes many problems too. > It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in. If you think there is something that needs improving in the web platform, contributing to that would be the best thing. If you have such a killer app that does not run well enough in current JS engines, you can contribute to one of the three open source JS engines to make it able to run your killer app.
- bsg75 14y ago
  But does not fragmentaion drive innovation (mutation -> evolution)? If the only progress that occurs are incremental improvements to existing platforms, then the web is in "maintenance mode".
  - azakai 14y ago
    I agree we need places where innovation can run wild, but also places where there are accepted standards. The web is pretty much our only complete platform that is standards-based. Fragmenting it risks killing it. Remember when sites were "best viewed in IE" and people without Windows basically could not browse the web? > If the only progress that occurs are incremental improvements to existing platforms, then the web is in "maintenance mode". How about WebGL, 10x faster JS than just a few years ago, typed arrays, video and audio tags, WebRTC, etc. etc. ..?
    - bsg75 14y ago
      > How about WebGL, 10x faster JS than just a few years ago, typed arrays, video and audio tags, WebRTC, etc. etc. ..? I was not implying that innovation had ceased. On the contrary, I love seeing stuff like this appear. Even if doomed from the outset to not become standard or widespread, the potential from experimentation is what keeps things interesting.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- gruseom 14y ago
  If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool. If it were merely a question of some minor incremental improvement, such as could be obtained by "contribut[ing] to one of the three open source JS engines", then I agree it wouldn't be worth the fragmentation. But then it wouldn't meet the definition of a "killer app" either. Nor would it be likely to gain traction. It would just be a gnat. What I'm talking about is only interesting if it might be disruptive. I think there's a chance that Lua as both language and implementation is good enough that it might enable things that simply aren't doable (performantly) in other ways. Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall. And what is so amazing about LuaJIT is that it has already proven it does not know that wall. At the same time Lua is so similar semantically to JS that it is not likely to mess with the things that made JS great, so integrating Lua into the web would arguably be a conservative design choice – more conservative, perhaps, than many proposals to "fix" JS by making it more static and proper-like.
  - azakai 14y ago
    > If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool. Well, hack all you want (not like you need anyone's permission ;), my concerns were not with that part, but with > a strategy to do an end run around vendors [..] drive installation of such a [LuaJIT] plug-in Hack it up if you want. But if you make a serious effort to drive adoption of a new plugin - that I have a problem with. > Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall. I also take Google's focus on Dart as partial admission of not being able to get V8 performance to where they want. But (luckily for the web), V8 is not the only game in town. Competitors to V8 have introduced new approaches that show a lot of promise - background compilation in IE, full-program type inference in Firefox - with many more ideas remaining. So I really doubt there will be a LuaJIT killer app. Lua might be faster on some benchmarks now, but it likely loses on others (like on any language comparison), and in any case the difference will become smaller over time.

by gruseom 14y ago

azakai 14y ago

> I've been thinking for a while that Lua and especially LuaJIT are so good that there might exist a strategy to do an end run around vendors and get LuaJIT into browsers as (initially) a plug-in. It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in. Please don't create yet another plugin. Plugins are bad for the web, they fragment it and if they end up de-facto standards that causes many problems too. > It's possible that there's a killer app waiting to be written that could run well in LuaJIT (but not JS) and that this could drive installation of such a plug-in. If you think there is something that needs improving in the web platform, contributing to that would be the best thing. If you have such a killer app that does not run well enough in current JS engines, you can contribute to one of the three open source JS engines to make it able to run your killer app.

bsg75 14y ago
But does not fragmentaion drive innovation (mutation -> evolution)? If the only progress that occurs are incremental improvements to existing platforms, then the web is in "maintenance mode".
- azakai 14y ago
  I agree we need places where innovation can run wild, but also places where there are accepted standards. The web is pretty much our only complete platform that is standards-based. Fragmenting it risks killing it. Remember when sites were "best viewed in IE" and people without Windows basically could not browse the web? > If the only progress that occurs are incremental improvements to existing platforms, then the web is in "maintenance mode". How about WebGL, 10x faster JS than just a few years ago, typed arrays, video and audio tags, WebRTC, etc. etc. ..?
  - bsg75 14y ago
    > How about WebGL, 10x faster JS than just a few years ago, typed arrays, video and audio tags, WebRTC, etc. etc. ..? I was not implying that innovation had ceased. On the contrary, I love seeing stuff like this appear. Even if doomed from the outset to not become standard or widespread, the potential from experimentation is what keeps things interesting.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gruseom 14y ago
If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool. If it were merely a question of some minor incremental improvement, such as could be obtained by "contribut[ing] to one of the three open source JS engines", then I agree it wouldn't be worth the fragmentation. But then it wouldn't meet the definition of a "killer app" either. Nor would it be likely to gain traction. It would just be a gnat. What I'm talking about is only interesting if it might be disruptive. I think there's a chance that Lua as both language and implementation is good enough that it might enable things that simply aren't doable (performantly) in other ways. Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall. And what is so amazing about LuaJIT is that it has already proven it does not know that wall. At the same time Lua is so similar semantically to JS that it is not likely to mess with the things that made JS great, so integrating Lua into the web would arguably be a conservative design choice – more conservative, perhaps, than many proposals to "fix" JS by making it more static and proper-like.
- azakai 14y ago
  > If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool. Well, hack all you want (not like you need anyone's permission ;), my concerns were not with that part, but with > a strategy to do an end run around vendors [..] drive installation of such a [LuaJIT] plug-in Hack it up if you want. But if you make a serious effort to drive adoption of a new plugin - that I have a problem with. > Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall. I also take Google's focus on Dart as partial admission of not being able to get V8 performance to where they want. But (luckily for the web), V8 is not the only game in town. Competitors to V8 have introduced new approaches that show a lot of promise - background compilation in IE, full-program type inference in Firefox - with many more ideas remaining. So I really doubt there will be a LuaJIT killer app. Lua might be faster on some benchmarks now, but it likely loses on others (like on any language comparison), and in any case the difference will become smaller over time.