5 ms·

like Java? :)

• BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  Yup or .Net with its MSIL. Then they could change the JavaScript standard every year if they wanted to and it wouldn't matter as it would compile to the same byte code. Naturally byte code improvements would happen slowly but that's not as big of a deal. It just makes sense to me but I haven't seen anyone working on it just occasionally talking about it. So maybe it doesn't make sense to the people working on web browsers, I dunno.
  • dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Yup or .Net with its MSIL. Then they could change the JavaScript standard every year if they wanted to and it wouldn't matter as it would compile to the same byte code. Not sure why you need byte code for that. You could just have a relatively stable base JS standard as the common target, and then a more rapidly changing set of advanced/experimental JS features implemented through compilers for the resulting, enhanced, JS+extra features languages that compile back to base JS. Heck, you could do the same thing for lots of other, non-JS languages that compile to base JS. In fact, that's exactly what is done today. Byte code isn't magic, its just another language you have to write an interpreter for -- just not a human-readable one.