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>Heck, it may even be significantly faster. Without native code, hardware doesn't have to care about backward compatibility any more! Just patch the suitable GC

>Heck, it may even be significantly faster. Without native code, hardware doesn't have to care about backward compatibility any more! Just patch the suitable GCC or LLVM back end, and recompile the brO-Ser. New processors will be able to have better instruction sets, be tuned for JIT compilation… The Mill CPU architecture for instance, with its low costs for branch mispredictions, already looks like nice target for interpreters. Heh, I hope you appreciate the irony in that one. On the one hand we have people arguing that we have to stick with the existing web platform for backwards compatibility reasons, but on the other you are suggesting it would be easy to switch the entire world to new totally incompatible processor architectures to make aforementioned web platforms performant.

loup-vaillant 12y ago
It's a matter of how many people you piss off. Ditch the browser, you have to change the whole web. Ditch the processor, and you have only a couple browsers to change. Apple did, it you know? Changing from PowerPC to X86. And they had native applications to contend with. I believe they got away with an emulation mode of some kind, I'm not sure. I for one wouldn't like to see the web take over the way it currently does. It's a mess, and it encourages more centralization than ever. But if it does, that will be the end of x86. (Actually, x86 would die if any virtual machine took over.)