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What prevents adding other languages to the web browser even now?

icebraining 12y ago
Getting people to agree on which should be added. Adding new languages is only useful if they're widely supported by browsers. Google is trying with Dart, they already have a fork of Chromium with a VM for it[1], but it still needs to be compiled to JS to support other browsers, and to many developers that loses its appeal. [1] https://www.dartlang.org/tools/dartium/ https://www.dartlang.org/tools/dartium/
- BrendanEich 12y ago
  And they need a way to avoid cyclic leaks among Dart and JS via the DOM. That adds a tax in the form of write barrier overhead, which caused Apple to reject the WebKit patch. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/018811.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...
  - curtis17 12y ago
    The most interesting way forward re languages/runtimes looks like something Brendan mentioned here: http://javascriptjabber.com/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript-with-brendan-eich/ http://javascriptjabber.com/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript... > At some point, Sweet.js ties the knot and people can write hygienic macros and extend the language.... And it’s all based on a common set of primitives and that’s the important thing. You can reason about the primitives. You can compose them. They’re compositional. They compose orthogonally. That’s the goal here. JavaScript has a lot of warts in it, but if you weed those out or deprecate them you end up with stuff that is compositional. And that’s where I think we’re heading.
    - curtis17 12y ago
      Scala moving in a similar direction. Odersky: That's going to be a more fundamental rethink of what Scala is. The main goal is to make it simpler, to review it or work out what its core is, and have a very simple core on which essentially the other features of Scala can all be based. Essentially, it's a way to modularize the language better, to base the features that we know from Scala on a very, very simple core that we can compile efficiently and reason precisely about. That's the main goals for Don Giovanni. http://www.infoworld.com/t/java-programming/scala-founder-language-due-fundamental-rethink-249845?page=0,1 http://www.infoworld.com/t/java-programming/scala-founder-la...

Getting people to agree on which should be added. Adding new languages is only useful if they're widely supported by browsers. Google is trying with Dart, they already have a fork of Chromium with a VM for it[1], but it still needs to be compiled to JS to support other browsers, and to many developers that loses its appeal. [1] https://www.dartlang.org/tools/dartium/ https://www.dartlang.org/tools/dartium/

BrendanEich 12y ago
And they need a way to avoid cyclic leaks among Dart and JS via the DOM. That adds a tax in the form of write barrier overhead, which caused Apple to reject the WebKit patch. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/018811.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...
- curtis17 12y ago
  The most interesting way forward re languages/runtimes looks like something Brendan mentioned here: http://javascriptjabber.com/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript-with-brendan-eich/ http://javascriptjabber.com/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript... > At some point, Sweet.js ties the knot and people can write hygienic macros and extend the language.... And it’s all based on a common set of primitives and that’s the important thing. You can reason about the primitives. You can compose them. They’re compositional. They compose orthogonally. That’s the goal here. JavaScript has a lot of warts in it, but if you weed those out or deprecate them you end up with stuff that is compositional. And that’s where I think we’re heading.
  - curtis17 12y ago
    Scala moving in a similar direction. Odersky: That's going to be a more fundamental rethink of what Scala is. The main goal is to make it simpler, to review it or work out what its core is, and have a very simple core on which essentially the other features of Scala can all be based. Essentially, it's a way to modularize the language better, to base the features that we know from Scala on a very, very simple core that we can compile efficiently and reason precisely about. That's the main goals for Don Giovanni. http://www.infoworld.com/t/java-programming/scala-founder-language-due-fundamental-rethink-249845?page=0,1 http://www.infoworld.com/t/java-programming/scala-founder-la...