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Well, the Dart VM is not like adding a backend to a compiler or VM - it is a complete VM in itself. For example, it has its own concepts of references etc., wh

by azakai 13y ago

Well, the Dart VM is not like adding a backend to a compiler or VM - it is a complete VM in itself. For example, it has its own concepts of references etc., which means that if you add the Dart VM alongside your JS VM, you need to be able to collect cycles spanning those two. That is not a trivial thing to do, and in fact Google has been working for a while on the Oilpan project to make Chromium capable of collecting such cycles, that span C++, v8 and the Dart VM. It's a huge engineering effort. Gecko can currently collect cycles between C++ and JS, but extending that is not trivial, and I believe Safari cannot collect such cycles and instead by design avoids creating such cycles - but that would not be possible with the Dart VM. It might not be practical for other browsers to adopt such a technology. So if Google sites force the Dart VM to be necessary to compete, that would basically mean that the other browsers cannot compete. Then there would be just Chrome, a single implementation of a web browser, dominating the market like IE used to. It might be good for users to have a single browser for a while, single implementations can move faster without regard for standards or openness. But lack of standardization and openness also means it is a proprietary platform, of which we already have many.

haberman 13y ago
> Well, the Dart VM is not like adding a backend to a compiler or VM - it is a complete VM in itself. My straw-man idea was not to add the Dart VM to the browser, it was to add a Dart-to-asm.js compiler to the browser, as an AOT compilation step. This would not involve integrating the VM at all. > It might not be practical for other browsers to adopt such a technology. Given that there are at least three completely independent and highly competitive JavaScript JIT-compiling VMs from a variety of different browser vendors, I find this unlikely. I think we are four levels into hypotheticals here. If every technical advance was rejected due to something bad that might happen four steps down the road, nothing would ever improve. We surely never would have gotten JavaScript. That could have gone badly in tons of different ways (especially since, as the first execution engine in a browser, there was no backward-compatibility strategy). Who would have believed in 1995 that 15 years later this technology would have gotten pushed so far, and that the competition would be so healthy? > So if Google sites force the Dart VM to be necessary to compete, that would basically mean that the other browsers cannot compete. Then there would be just Chrome, a single implementation of a web browser, dominating the market like IE used to. The entire web platform is standardized (including Dart, which is standards-track). I would challenge you to name a standardized technology with a market comparable to the web in which one vendor is so dominant that all of the other competitors are defeated and it becomes a monoculture, despite a large demand. If anything, I think the prospect of a web that cannot keep up with other application technologies far more likely and troubling.
- azakai 13y ago
  > My straw-man idea was not to add the Dart VM to the browser, it was to add a Dart-to-asm.js compiler to the browser, as an AOT compilation step. Oh ok, sorry for misunderstanding you. That might work, but it is unclear it would be any faster than dart2js. Also, AOT is not likely to work in Dart which is optionally typed, unless a codebase is actually fully typed. Overall it seems an interesting experiment perhaps - I've suggested it myself - but an unlikely one. > I would challenge you to name a standardized technology with a market comparable to the web in which one vendor is so dominant that all of the other competitors are defeated and it becomes a monoculture, despite a large demand. Well, the web - back in the IE days. Also to a lesser extent the smartphone mobile web which was a monoculture of WebKit (and to some degree still is today). And the point is that standards become irrelevant when there is a monoculture. In theory windows supported various POSIX APIs, but in practice windows became a proprietary monoculture.

by azakai 13y ago

haberman 13y ago

> Well, the Dart VM is not like adding a backend to a compiler or VM - it is a complete VM in itself. My straw-man idea was not to add the Dart VM to the browser, it was to add a Dart-to-asm.js compiler to the browser, as an AOT compilation step. This would not involve integrating the VM at all. > It might not be practical for other browsers to adopt such a technology. Given that there are at least three completely independent and highly competitive JavaScript JIT-compiling VMs from a variety of different browser vendors, I find this unlikely. I think we are four levels into hypotheticals here. If every technical advance was rejected due to something bad that might happen four steps down the road, nothing would ever improve. We surely never would have gotten JavaScript. That could have gone badly in tons of different ways (especially since, as the first execution engine in a browser, there was no backward-compatibility strategy). Who would have believed in 1995 that 15 years later this technology would have gotten pushed so far, and that the competition would be so healthy? > So if Google sites force the Dart VM to be necessary to compete, that would basically mean that the other browsers cannot compete. Then there would be just Chrome, a single implementation of a web browser, dominating the market like IE used to. The entire web platform is standardized (including Dart, which is standards-track). I would challenge you to name a standardized technology with a market comparable to the web in which one vendor is so dominant that all of the other competitors are defeated and it becomes a monoculture, despite a large demand. If anything, I think the prospect of a web that cannot keep up with other application technologies far more likely and troubling.

azakai 13y ago
> My straw-man idea was not to add the Dart VM to the browser, it was to add a Dart-to-asm.js compiler to the browser, as an AOT compilation step. Oh ok, sorry for misunderstanding you. That might work, but it is unclear it would be any faster than dart2js. Also, AOT is not likely to work in Dart which is optionally typed, unless a codebase is actually fully typed. Overall it seems an interesting experiment perhaps - I've suggested it myself - but an unlikely one. > I would challenge you to name a standardized technology with a market comparable to the web in which one vendor is so dominant that all of the other competitors are defeated and it becomes a monoculture, despite a large demand. Well, the web - back in the IE days. Also to a lesser extent the smartphone mobile web which was a monoculture of WebKit (and to some degree still is today). And the point is that standards become irrelevant when there is a monoculture. In theory windows supported various POSIX APIs, but in practice windows became a proprietary monoculture.