Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2233017.html

by AndrewDucker • 16 years ago

152 176 16 years ago

andrewducker.livejournal.com

ithkuil• 16 years ago

It would improve script parsing speed but perhaps hinder the evolution of internals of the interpreters. Of course engines could always retranslate this standard bytecode in another internal representation and jits.

pedrocr2• 16 years ago

I tried to make this point in this submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790311

The fact that it also ranted about Javascript shifted the discussion though

mattmanser• 16 years ago

Just keep on saying it! I've also been coming to the same conclusion and saying it, though just like you ranting about other stuff brought negative reactions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860623 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815214

But I'm glad to see more and more people are starting to argue for a pro-choice stance on languages in the browser.

user24• 16 years ago

I remembered that post when I saw this headline. I think from a philosophical viewpoint it's a good idea - though I've no idea what the implementation difficulties might be (could google have created V8 if we had a bytecode system?). But from a practical stance, what's the benefit? What would it achieve?

pedrocr2• 16 years ago

>But from a practical stance, what's the benefit? What would it achieve?

The reasons I outlined in my post were things like having a single form validation codebase, deployed both server side and client side. More ambitiously you could have the same codebase used for the server-side online portions of something like gmail and also retarget that to use for offline gmail. Basically the big divide between your server-side and client-side codebases would start to disappear.

Seems like Google's native client system is a great step in this direction. Soon enough it may be possible to target say Lua to LLVM bytecode and deploy that to a browser in a bundle of javascript. If the browser supports NaCi you execute the LLVM bytecode with the built-in VM, if not you have a fallback bytecode interpreter in Javascript. That way you get full coverage of browsers with only degradation of performance when NaCi isn't available. I'm not sure however how fast you could make the Javascript fallback. If it is very slow it may not be workable.

joubert• 16 years ago

Google nativeclient might be a start... http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

siddhant• 16 years ago

There was a session about it, this time in the Google Developer Day at Munich. Interesting stuff. Right now they're stressing on C/C++, but probably C# is up next.

stcredzero5• 16 years ago

Go! Go is the cool lang for NaCl!

AndrewDucker4• 16 years ago

Well, Mono supports LLVM, so it sounds feasible.

joelburget• 16 years ago

In my experience NaCl is not a viable platform at this time.

My friend and I spent a couple weeks just trying to get the developer tools to work. We tried on Ubuntu, OS X, Windows, and Arch Linux. We weren't able to get started on a single platform. In the process we came across bugs that were several months old that haven't been fixed, even on their supported platforms.

Another thing to worry about is whether NaCl will take off. We can't know how committed Google is and how many users will install the plugin. It was supposed to be enabled by default in Chrome 6 (I believe) but it still isn't enabled in 7.

NaCl is still promising (especially Portable Native Client) but Google has to get it working first.

hannibalhorn2• 16 years ago

I think the change to PNaCl (LLVM) is largely responsible for this - after that decision was made and without much in the way of existing apps, there really isn't much incentive for them to invest more effort in the x86 specific version of NaCl. When PNaCl is ready and bundled with Chrome and Android, it's only going to take one killer app to really establish it.

hannibalhorn2• 16 years ago

Google is already heading there with native client. They're changing the approach to serving up LLVM bytecode on the server, which is translated to x86 or ARM by the browser prior to execution. For future apps that require performance, it should work well and with Google's weight behind the tech I think it'll be widely adopted.

There's already a version of python that runs in native client, and pretty much anything could conceivably be ported.

AndrewDucker4• 16 years ago

Oooh, LLVM bytecode. I hadn't thought of that, but it's a perfect choice!

I hope it does get picked up by other people.

tav• 16 years ago

http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf

^ Overview of the LLVM-based Portable Native Client (PNaCl) architecture.

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

How do you get it properly sandboxed, while still able to interact with the browser document model?

stcredzero5• 16 years ago

Limiting the translation and also through binary inspection. That's kinda the whole point of NaCl!

watt• 16 years ago

Do you remember Internet Explorer with VBScript?

jarin• 16 years ago

I was seriously trying to forget.

CodeMage• 16 years ago

I really liked this comment (by khoth): "And once we have standardised bytecode, the next logical step would presumably be to improve performance by creating CPUs that can execute it directly. In 20 years we'll all be back where we started."

AndrewDucker4• 16 years ago

I believe some work went on to produce a Java-running chip at one point. It proved better to compile down to whatever suited the chip best.

iwr• 16 years ago

In that sense, Intel is just making CPUs on top of x86 bytecode that runs natively. I wonder if a little extra firmware can eliminate the need for an OS altogether.

gvb• 16 years ago

There have been several JVM (without the "V") created[1]. None of them really caught on other than the ARM Jazelle[2], which isn't really a JM, it is more of a JVM accelerator: it has support for direct execution of many of the JVM opcodes.

After investing lots of time and money into creating a JM, the companies were chagrined to find a general purpose processor with a good JVM (especially with JIT) could run circles around a direct-execution processor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

mvgoogler• 16 years ago

I think you're thinking of Azul (http://www.azulsystems.com/products/vega/arch).

They've been slowly withering away for the past couple of years (at least judging by the number of cars in their parking lot - I work in the building they are in). They just announced a cloud-based product based on their systems, so maybe there's still some life there.

praptak• 16 years ago

Everything old is new again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

stcredzero5• 16 years ago

In 20 years we'll all be back where we started.

Only if people forget the past. If the past is any indication, people will forget. What were we talking about again?

akeefer• 16 years ago

Talk to Cliff Click (or sift through his blog http://www.azulsystems.com/blogs/cliff) and he will quickly disabuse you of the notion that having bytecode instructions in a processor is a good idea. For optimal performance you want a generic RISC-type processor with good hardware performance for critical things like read-barriers that the bytecode might require; you really don't want to design a processor that directly executes Java bytecode.

There's a whole hell of a lot of optimization that gets done in the JIT layer besides just translating bytecode to machine code, and you want all that stuff to get done in software rather than trying to build it into your processor. Once you've done all that stuff, emitting actual assembly code isn't really the hard part, so you might as well just design a processor that you can make fast, give it a simple general-purpose instruction set, target that instruction set in your JIT, and then add a few special goodies as you need them for things that are really, really hard to do fast without specialized hardware support.

stevecooperorg3• 16 years ago

I'd be really interested in seeing this develop. Define a bytecode interpreter (JSVM?) and push bytecode into it. Performance may be god-awful, but you'd be free to use whatever language you fancy.

Parchment is an example of the approach, implementing the z-machine VM in javascript. http://code.google.com/p/parchment/

stcredzero5• 16 years ago

Performance may be god-awful

Why, after decades of JIT bytecode VMs, do we still have this misconception? Many of the widespread JVM implementations are faster than V8. LuaJIT and C# Mono are also VM implementations that JIT bytecode and are faster than V8! Is this a troll?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

contextfree4• 16 years ago

I think he's suggesting a bytecode interpreter implemented in JavaScript.

almost• 16 years ago

The post you replied to seemed to be suggesting a VM written in Javascript. I don't think it's particularly controversial to speculate that the performance of that would be pretty awful :)

stevecooperorg3• 16 years ago

As people have commented, I'm suggesting writing a javascript function which takes pre-compiled bytecode; like so;

    function interpret(bytecode) {
        // stack machine implementation goes here
    }

And called like so;

   var bytecode = load("http://my.domain.com/myscript.bytecode");
   interpret(bytecode);

I'm not suggesting that bytecode is inherently slow -- just that I could take a great stab at writing a slow bytecode interpreter in JavaScript. ;)

So under this scheme, you could do a server-side compilation of any language -- let's imagine Pascal as an example -- and deliver it back to the client as bytecode. Now you've broken the browser dependence on Javascript. At the cost of a VM written in JavaScript.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

In all honesty... what's the difference?

Turing complete language ≈ Turing complete language. Just make something to compile your language of choice into JavaScript, or make a new one (CoffeeScript). Bytecode is just a little more dense, little faster executing, far harder to investigate language than JavaScript, which the browser can compile for added speed anyway.

I prefer my language-of-the-web to be readable, thanks. Then I can find out wtf it's doing. And where you really need speed, native client is just about your only option.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

The difference is that Javascript is a crappy language and I resent having to write in it. In addition, it lacks types and is therefore slower and does not execute the same way on all platforms.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

Not the same on all platforms is a wholly legitimate complaint. It's frickin' annoying that browsers don't all implement the same language.

But bytecode won't solve that. IE will still refuse to implement subset-X, WebKit will still prefix their CSS with -webkit, etc. Until everything settles down and decides on one implementation, in which case I'd still prefer to be able to read what the web is sending to me.

haribilalic2• 16 years ago

Crappy is subjective. I actually like JavaScript.

JavaScript, although dynamic and loosely typed, does have types: string, number, object (including array, function and date), null and undefined are all JavaScript types.

lincolnq2• 16 years ago

Then why don't you treat your JavaScript as object code, and compile a language you like better to it?

It does not lack types (it just lacks static type checking); it is not significantly slower (JavaScript JIT is very advanced, and you're not compute-bound in JavaScript). And "it does not execute the same way on all platforms" is true for pretty much all languages on all platforms, so I don't know what you're getting at.

If you'd like a better language I can suggest CoffeeScript and ghcjs.

jules5• 16 years ago

The difference is that Javascript is about the worst possible IL for a compiler to compile down to. Yeah you can recover some of the speed by spending man years on making Javascript execute somewhat fast.

As a bytecode you wouldn't use a bytecode that is targeted at handling Javascript constructs. You'd use a bytecode that, for example, supports machine integers (unlike Javascript). Something that allows you to allocate objects, rather than string indexed hash tables. Something that allows you to allocate an array of floats, rather than an array of boxed floats.

InclinedPlane5• 16 years ago

"Worst possible"? Sub-optimal perhaps, but Javascript is becoming very fast in the browser, perhaps it's not such a bad choice after all.

wmf4• 16 years ago

As a bytecode you wouldn't use a bytecode that is targeted at handling Javascript constructs.

So now you're asking the browsers to support two different VMs; one for JS and another one. Standardizing bytecode for JS (perhaps based on the existing Nitro or JagerMonkey bytecode) would be much less work.

ianb2• 16 years ago

The browser provides very high level constructs (e.g., the DOM), handling numbers quickly is uninteresting and would be a poor direction for optimization. While I think an appropriate VM could be something interesting, I doubt an appropriate VM in this case would look like the JVM.

kristiandupont• 16 years ago

Well, you would be developing with plain javascript or symbols just like when writing native code. And besides, minified javascript might be more readable than bytecode but just barely.

pcarmichael• 16 years ago

One difference is in compiler optimizations. For a given language, compilers can often make inferences based on the code and the semantics of the language, allowing for very targeted optimizations. If you go from LanguageFoo -> Javascript -> bytecode, then you may be limiting the range of optimizations possible (because Javascript may not be able to infer the same things about the code, be it because of program structure, language semantics, etc.)

m0th87• 16 years ago

The same holds true with bytecodes. e.g. TCO on the JVM: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105834/does-the-jvm-preve...

robhu4• 16 years ago

Why not make the 'byte code' the LLVM IF ? That way you leverage all the stuff from the LLVM project for making it go fast.

The main thing to do then is just to have a front end for your favourite language the outputs LLVM IF.

scott_s3• 16 years ago

I don't think you understand the proposal: JavaScript would still be the language of the web. The things you don't see would just be handled differently.

In fact, it would be easier to to "find out wtf it's doing" because something that is now ad-hoc - what to do with the JS given to a browser - would be standardized. Keep in mind that the browsers already do something to your JS, either compile it to byte-code for the browsers own VM, or compile it directly to machine code. This proposal would standardize what the intermediate representation would be.

robhu4• 16 years ago

No, the idea is that you could compile whatever language you like into byte code that would then run in the browser.

Javascript might still be the main language on the web (and would probably continue to be handled in the same way it is now) but you could also use other languages.

silentbicycle16• 16 years ago

Before speculating too much about "a bytecode standard", etc., it would probably be helpful to understand virtual machines and instruction sets.

I know web programmers generally aren't big on assembly or writing virtual machines, but an instruction set (group of bytecodes) design and implementation predisposes a processor/VM to certain operations. A VM for an OO language is going to have bytecodes (and other infrastructure) for doing fast method lookup, because it will really hurt performance otherwise. A functional or logic language VM will probably have tail-call optimization, perhaps opcodes specific to pattern matching / unification, and a different style of garbage collector.

Compare the JVM to the Lua or Erlang virtual machines; think about the issues people run into when trying to port languages that aren't like Java to the JVM. Unless people are very deliberate about making a really general instruction set, a "bytecode standard" informed by Javascript could be similarly awkward for languages that aren't just incremental improvements on Javascript. Besides, you can't optimize for everything.

There are a LOT of details I'm glossing over (e.g. sandboxing/security concerns, RISC vs. CISC, the DOM), but I've been meaning to point this out since I read someone saying, "Why do people keep writing more VMs? Why don't we just use the JVM for everything and move on?" It's not that easy.

chrisaycock3• 16 years ago

Right, it's same reason we still have ARM despite the success of x86. Or why some hardware vendors bundle FPGAs rather than rely on GPUs or custom ASICs. The instruction set is absolutely vital for a given domain's performance.

robhu4• 16 years ago

Sure, so it'd be hard to come up with a bytecode standard that worked really well for anything you might want to run on it - but you could probably come up with a reasonable bytecode / VM that would work reasonably well for most things.

For example, imagine that there was no threat of being sued by Oracle, etc. You could just use the JVM - that already has lots of things that compile to it which work reasonably well. I'm not arguing that we should use the JVM, but only that something like the JVM seems to work reasonably well.

Anyway - having a way that's OK or reasonable to run (say) Ruby in the browser is a lot better than the current situation where there is no such way (without using proprietary stuff).

scott_s3• 16 years ago

All true. But I think the potential benefits are real, and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing if the JS VM was specialized for JS. Standardizing the byte-codes could allow a looser coupling between browsers and JS. It could also allow for people to play with JS optimizations and augmentations without having to touch the VM internals itself.

All of this makes me think that if I was a VM researcher, I'd seriously consider going in this direction. And not being a VM researcher makes me think maybe I should be one.

silentbicycle16• 16 years ago

I agree with you. Typical web devs probably don't have enough context about virtual machine implementation to understand the trade-offs, though.

SriniK• 16 years ago

I think having a byte code standard is totally possible. Webkit js engine Nitro/Squirrelfish already has bytecode. Spec is here http://webkit.org/specs/squirrelfish-bytecode.html

Nitro follows lot of luajit methods and techniques some are outlined here by Mike Pall - http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908 Some adopted by Nitro - http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/ Nitro does the js-code -> bytecode -> jit-optimization.

However the more beneficial question is how long does it take it to convert js-code -> bytecode and how much it boosts overall performance. Seems like it is very small compared to execution times. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/squirrelfish-dev/2009-May...

On the contrary V8 does the direct compile yet following jvm/jit techniques. More details by Lars Bak here http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-E... and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWhMKalEicY V8 does some more non traditional things like snapshotting, hidden classes, etc which give incremental performance boost. If there was a bytecode standard some V8 techniques might not be applicable but it is possible to maintain the performance boost.

I would love to see bytecode getting as a standard so that people prefer to stick to whatever language they are comfortable with. For instance I like both js and python but if there was an option, I would stick to python for all my needs.

coliveira• 16 years ago

Another issue is that when you create a virtual machine you basically tie down your potential for optimization to what the opcodes can do, instead of optimizing for the language itself. This is a major problem with Java.

For example, Smalltalk has an advantage compared to Java in which designers of VMs can change the opcodes as needed to get better performance. That's not possible with Java because of the JVM.

The future of the language may be compromised by the decisions you make on the VM. For example, think of the problems Java has in fully supporting 64 bit software -- most of it based on the decisions that were made when 32bit processors where the norm.

jules5• 16 years ago

One way to avoid the problem is to make the bytecodes low level enough. You don't add bytecodes for method lookup or unification. You add bytecodes on top of which these can be implemented efficiently.

The downside is that if the bytecodes are low level the chances of different languages interoperating easily are small (e.g. take x86 assembly: Python doesn't automatically interoperate with Ruby, but take MSIL, now they do more easily).

pyre2• 16 years ago

It's probably less to do with a bytecode 'standard' vs. a set of standard libraries for doing things outside of the browser (file manipulations, etc). Then browsers could just not support those libraries, but JavaScript VM developers could. In this way, it would be possible to not have 'the future of JavaScript' tied down to a specific bytecode implementation. Then people could pick and choose the VM that they want to run their JS in based on what sort of optimizations they needed.

One of the largest requirements here would probably be a method of linking against/using C libraries, and also a standard for 'import/#include/etc' statements.

Maybe I'm being naive here though. Feel free to correct me.

SudarshanP• 16 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ may answer your need. Hopefully someday something like this will be available cross browser...

chrisaycock3• 16 years ago

Whenever I hear "standardized bytecode", I think of Parrot:

http://www.parrot.org/

robhu4• 16 years ago

That was actually what was in my mind when I originally mentioned the idea to andrewducker!

cpr6• 16 years ago

...and then your mind immediately rejects the whole idea. ;-)

amix3• 16 years ago

Having a standard bytecode would make it much harder to steal code which is much needed as web and mobile applications shift towards using lots of JavaScript.

Currently it's way too easy to steal everything since the whole source is exposed. You can obfuscate JavaScript and CSS, but the main semantics will still be there and someone that's interested will still steal your code (this has happend twice to us, even if all of our JS is obfuscated using Google Closure...) The same thing could happen with bytecode, but their takeout would not be maintainable. Obfuscated JavaScript is still maintainable, since the structure and semantics are largely there.

dedward• 16 years ago

I'd counter that that ability to easily copy what the browser sees and dissect it is what leads to rapid growth and innovation on the web front.... obfuscating everything will act counter to that, and leave the web not nearly as nice a place as we'd like it to be.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Bytecode-compiled languages are dreadfully easy to decompile.

amix3• 16 years ago

The point isn't that you can't decompile bytecode-languages, but that the decompiled bytecode is a lot harder to maintain than obfuscated JavaScript...

contextfree4• 16 years ago

If anything I think e.g. .NET/CLR bytecode is easier to reverse engineer than obfuscated JavaScript, because of the type metadata.

amix3• 16 years ago

With obfuscated JavaScript you get all the sematics and for the most time all the global functions and data structures names since they aren't obfuscated away. This is a lot more structure and information than you get in your average bytecode code (especially since bytecode tends to be much more low level than something like obfuscated JavaScript).

logancautrell• 16 years ago

I believe you are looking for http://nodejs.org/

alanh• 16 years ago

(I didn’t downvote you but) you answered the wrong parsing of OP’s original question: It wasn’t “why can’t we use JS elsewhere?” but rather “Why can’t we use other languages in the browser,” a semi-tired plea from those who haven’t learned to love JavaScript and/or don’t realize that due to the countless number of browsers out there, JavaScript is going to be the only option for DOM scripting for years, at minimum.

chc2• 16 years ago

This is why it's a good idea to at least skim the article rather than just reading the HN headline before commenting.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Am I missing something, or did we all have a browser bytecode standard that everyone hopped on board with, and it turned out nobody really liked feeding browsers compiled programs after all?

patio112• 16 years ago

It was the core, defining feature of the most used language in the business world... and everyone with any sense is trying to forget it every happened.

rlpb2• 16 years ago

It was never integrated into the DOM, though, was it? I am only aware of it being used in a separate, sandboxed area on the page, unable to interact with anything else except in a very limited way.

(Never mind the slow loading time etc)

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Have you not done the [java applet DOM] Google search, or is every link on the first SERP wrong in some way?

patio112• 16 years ago

You could integrate Java applets into the DOM. Now you have two problems. (Keep in mind that back when this was popular IE 4 was busy kicking the pants off of Netscape Navigator. Fancy programming against IE 4?)

AndrewDucker4• 16 years ago

It meant running as a plugin, which was (at the time) incredibly slow.

nivertech• 16 years ago

Java Applets never were a first class citizens in the browser. Same as Flash. I think it's a really good idea to have some LLVM-type of bytecode standard.

narag2• 16 years ago

Are compiled programs what people disliked? Do most people even know if an applet is a script, bytecode or compiled?

I don't believe that compiled programs is what the blog is advocating either, but the ability to run programming languages other than JS.

ianb2• 16 years ago

The performance characteristics of the JVM didn't match the web IMHO. Javascript wasn't fast in a raw sense, but it didn't trade startup time for running time, didn't trade memory for performance, etc. The basis of Javascript is one that made sense for the web, for pages, for transient code. Since then they've done stuff to improve it, to make those issues less of a tradeoff, but when they started and had to make those tradeoffs Javascript made them correctly. The JVM didn't make them correctly for a web page. But I'm not sure the JVM was every really meant for that purpose.

In general though I think this demonstrates the environment and language mismatch problem. Retrofitting existing languages onto the web won't be very satisfying. There might be room for new languages (CoffeeScript is cool, for instance), and bytecodes could make that process more elegant, but ultimately those languages need to be different takes on Javascript or else it will feel ugly and awkward.

teyc• 16 years ago

I believe the biggest cause of the JVM start up times were initializing the static members of classes.

Gilad Bracha wrote more here http://canoo.com/blog/2010/05/07/java-post-mortem-with-gilad...

Hoff• 16 years ago

Discussions of technical feasibility aside, getting a sufficiently large installed base to make this interesting is (as usual) the "fun" part; your plan for getting to critical mass against an available and "good enough" solution.

As for previous bytecode approaches to consider, there are the Lisp Machines, or the Burroughs B5000 Algol box, or the EFI byte code (EBC) interpreter and the EBC I/O drivers, or UCSD pCode, or all the gonzo things you could do with the VAX User Writable Control Store, the JITs underneath Java and Lua and other languages, or...

And HTTP is printable, which means you're working within character-encoding constraints or with escapements.

There are the not-inconsequential security requirements.

And then there's the question of how a provider might make money with this, if you're not undertaking this effort for free.

Have at...

klync• 16 years ago

Congratulations on being the only person in this thread with two feet on the ground. Interesting discussion, nonetheless. But purely academic.

pjscott• 16 years ago

Since Google is actually working on this, I would read their PNaCL paper before calling the discussion "purely academic":

http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf

Summary: Send LLVM bytecode to the browser, and enforce sandboxing by inspecting the compiled code.

ssp• 16 years ago

It's not a bad idea.

In fact, why not take it a step further and make a stand-alone client that only executes the byte code? It would be different from Java for two reasons:

(a) The bytecode format could be much simpler if it weren't tied to a particular language (no type system, no objects, maybe not even a garbage collector). If the bytecode was similar to a real CPU architecture, it would be possible to target it from LLVM.

(b) There would be no humongous standard library to install, because it could just be downloaded on demand. With almost all of the library living on the server side, application authors could avoid a lot of the usual compatibility nightmares with different client implementations each one with its own bugs and workarounds.

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

I'd take it even further and implement the various web standards on this VM. That way when HTML6 or CSS4 comes out you don't need to wait 4 years for everyone to upgrade their browser, you just download it automatically the first time it's used.

This is sort of taking Cappuccino/Objective-J's principle of "shipping the runtime" to the extreme.

alexmchale• 16 years ago

It's an interesting theory, but ultimately irrelevant. The thing is that there are SO MANY people working right now to make JavaScript incredibly fast. It's not hard to imagine a future where JavaScript is the fastest reasonable way to write software -- simply because it's the language that has the most R&D going for it.

Did I say future? Oh, hello NodeJS.

I don't envision that we'll be writing JavaScript itself forever -- but rather a super-syntax on top of it that compiles down to JS. CoffeeScript is the first generation of this kind of programming language.

I do, however, believe that for the foreseeable future, JavaScript will become the lingua franca of day-to-day programming.

silentbicycle16• 16 years ago

And yet, for all the resources being thrown at improving Javascript, LuaJIT is still significantly faster. Oh, and it was written by one person.

The design of Javascript itself limits performance in various ways, unfortunately. See this discussion between Mike Pall (of LuaJIT) and Brendan Eich: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57671.

adamzochowski• 16 years ago

But you can run different languages inside a browser.

Activestate had Perl running inside browser: http://docs.activestate.com/activeperl/5.8/Components/Window...

  <script language="PerlScript">
    $window->document->write('Hello world!');
  </script>

Also you can run VBScript. I have seen code that avoid javascript confirm() and tries to check first if it can use VBScripts msgbox function, just so it can provide 'yes'/'no' buttons. Aka:

  function confirmVB (text)
    confirmVB = msgbox ( Text , VBYesNo )
  end function

and then javascript

  function confirmYesNo(txtText)
  {
    if (window.vbSupported)
    {
  	return confirmVB(txtText);
    } else  {
  	return confirm(txtText + " (ok = yes, cancel = no)"   );
    }
  }

Cheers

snissn• 16 years ago

Microsoft's silverlight plugin allows for embedding python and ruby in the browser: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/dynamic-languages/

nikcub• 16 years ago

and Javascript. It is very very fast with Javascript.

You can do what is discussed in this thread today by detecting Silverlight in the client and if it exists use it instead of Javascript source. DOM access, manipulation and everything else is just so much faster.

The Silverlight SDK is free, you can get it on Linux and OS X (Moonlight) and there are a lot of Silverlight VM's out there

nix• 16 years ago

My admittedly biased view: I spent two years of my life trying to make the JVM communicate gracefully with Javascript - there were plenty of us at Netscape who thought that bytecode was a better foundation for mobile code. But Sun made it very difficult, building their complete bloated software stack from scratch. They didn't want Java to cooperate with anything else, let alone make it embeddable into another piece of software. They wrote their string handling code in an interpreted language rather than taint themselves with C! As far as I can tell, Sun viewed Netscape - Java's only significant customer at the time - as a mere vector for their Windows replacement fantasies. Anybody who actually tried to use Java would just have to suffer.

Meanwhile Brendan was doing the work of ten engineers and three customer support people, and paying attention to things that mattered to web authors, like mixing JS code into HTML, instant loading, integration with the rest of the browser, and working with other browser vendors to make JS an open standard.

So now JS is the x86 assembler of the web - not as pretty as it might be, but it gets the job done (GWT is the most hilarious case in point). It would be a classic case of worse is better except that Java only looked better from the bottom up. Meanwhile JS turned out to be pretty awesome. Good luck trying to displace it.

SWF was the other interesting bytecode contender, but I don't know much about the history there. Microsoft's x86 virtualization tech was also pretty cool but they couldn't make it stick alone.

InclinedPlane5• 16 years ago

x86 is a perfect comparative example. An architecture that is a patch on a patch on a patch (add several more layers here until you're tired) going back to the 8086 a kajillion years ago (a processor which was less sophisticated and powerful than an arduino). Intel tried to kill the architecture (replacing it with IA64) but AMD patched it yet again and the result was successful.

Nobody sane would design an architecture like x86 (or event x86-64) from the ground up today. Yet here we are.

Zaak• 16 years ago

We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

-- Ellen Ullman

Tuna-Fish• 16 years ago

I would just like to point out that IA64 wasn't really a significant step up. VLIW is a good idea for DSPs and GPUs and whatnot, but for the kind of dynamic, branchy code that we all know and love, IA-64 was quite probably the only somewhat modern CPU arch that was actually worse than x86.

jallmann2• 16 years ago

I might be missing something here, but this implicates a few things:

You won't be writing code in the browser anymore. Otherwise you'd have fragmentation where the user doesn't have the proper interpreter installed, and a never ending stream of "language downloads" which might be cool to devs but horribly impractical for end users.

Because we're not writing in the browser anymore, we'd be back to offline compilation and static code generation. I suppose it'd be possible to JIT the bytecode (assuming that current Javascript optimizers work on the IR; I don't know enough to qualify this any further). From my casual browsing of LtU, it seems that tracing JITs in particular may offer optimizations dificult to achieve with static bytecode compilation, particularly in identifying hot spots. But the more I think of it, that's a non-issue because you're still compiling to bytecode and JITing from there.

This feels very Java-ish to me. If you really want to script the browser in another language, compiling to Javascript (a'la GWT) would essentially do the same thing.

stevecooperorg3• 16 years ago

> You won't be writing code in the browser anymore

You could be. Impement a URL like http://mydomain/scripts/MyScript.bytecode. This is a page which compiles, say MyScript.rb into bytecode and delivers it back to the client. You get a new copy by saving a file on the server and hitting refresh, and there's only one interpreter to download.

jallmann2• 16 years ago

That just moves the bytecode compilation to the server -- so you're back to my original point of generating the code statically. In fact it'd probably be worse, since there is no reason to compile MyScript.rb to bytecode more than once. It's like generating a dynamic page with Rails when all you really need is static, cacheable HTML.

cpr6• 16 years ago

No, it wouldn't help at all: let me point to the overwhelming success of standards (XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, Postscript) that are character-based.

Think of Javascript as a (human-readable) virtual machine layer itself, below which the implementation is free to do as it pleases as long as it meets the JS standard semantics.

Detrus• 16 years ago

Maybe browser makers could expose a few lower level constructs in JS to make efforts like CoffeeScript, Objective-J and GWT easier?

That could be a short term solution. Long term we have to hope that LLVM and NaCl pick up steam.

But many languages for the same tasks will create fragmentation. Right now there is a big pool of developers proficient in JS. They even use the same libraries! The libraries are where a lot of productivity gains come from. The web became an "easy" platform to develop for. With fragmentation that could be lost.

CoffeeScript is interoperable with JS, easy to pick up because it's mainly a cleanup, but Objective-J and GWT are too far out. GWT needs a reworked JQuery, called GQuery.

So there are these economic considerations that are probably more important than language preference.

tolmasky2• 16 years ago

Not sure what you mean by Objective-J being too far out. Objective-J is much closer and "interoperable" with JS than CoffeeScript because it is a strict superset of JavaScript (in other words, all JavaScript is also Objective-J). Practically what this means is that any existing JS works alongside Objective-J with no changes whatsoever, the syntaxes do not "collide". The difference between ObjJ and JS are comparable to ECMAScript 2 and 5 (additions of new features and keywords)

jashkenas2• 16 years ago

Not to be combative, but I think what he means is this: Although it's perfectly easy to use JavaScript from Objective-J, the same is not true in reverse. ObjJ generates code that looks like this:

    objj_msgSend(objj_msgSend(CPIndexSet,"alloc"),
      "initWithIndexSet:",_selectedRowIndexes);

... where objj_msgSend is how the Objective-J "interpreter" does it's magic. If I wanted to use a library that was originally written in Objective-J, from JavaScript, I'd have a hell of a hard time calling it correctly, unless the library author took special care to make it JavaScript-compatible in the first place. The syntaxes may not collide, but the semantics certainly don't match up.

On the other hand, you'd never know that you were calling a CoffeeScript library from JS, unless you inspected the source, and vice-versa. In that sense, they're interoperable.

kqueue• 16 years ago

Just translate it to javascript.

kevinburke• 16 years ago

If bytecode became the standard it would further obscure scripting code and make it tougher to read other people's code.

abecedarius• 16 years ago

I took a whack at this 9 years ago. My code's at http://wry.me/~darius/software/idel and there were other, probably worthier, attempts around the same time and before, like Michael Franz's work with Oberon. Basically: make a low-level VM more or less like LLVM without the machine-dependent semantics and with a compact, easy-to-verify wire format. Apparently PNaCl is working on fixing those infelicities now, or at least the machine dependence.

(I had some fun but decided the obstacles to addoption were too great and we'd end up with x86 in the browser someday. So the NaCl announcement years later amused and gratified me.)

DjDarkman2• 16 years ago

Take a look at Coffee Script.

thisrod• 16 years ago

Why use a virtual machine when you have a real machine? It takes some cleverness to do safely, but the AI lab are a lot clever, and they've found a way:

"Vx32 is a user-mode library that can be linked into arbitrary applications that wish to create secure, isolated execution environments in which to run untrusted extensions or plug-ins implemented as native x86 code."

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/

stefs• 16 years ago

imho an intermediate bytecode makes no sense, as silentbicycle explained.

3 alternatives:

1) make every browser vendor implement multiple runtimes

2) x-to-js translators

3) interpreters in implemented in javascript

ad 1) multiple runtimes: not a good idea, because of multiple reasons.

first, versioning hell. javascript is ~15 years old, and browser vendors are still not able to provide 100% compatibility. you'd have versioning hell, only worse. second, it would hurt javascript performance, because browser vendors would have to split ressources. third: which languages should be supported? you just couldn't please everyone, so there would be ongoing "why is language x supported but not y?" problems.

ad 2) translators: are in use now. see coffeescript, gwt and ghcjs, ...

pros:

- almost native javascript speed

- already possible

cons:

- small translation overhead (depending on if it's JITted or precompiled)

- not everything is possible. if the javascript runtime doesn't support tail call optimization, the translation won't have it either. certain magic just doesn't translate.

ad 3) interpreters implemented in js

afaik there are some, e.g. js brainfuck interpreters.

pros:

- the sky's the limit

- already possible

cons:

- slow (adds an emulation layer).

that said, i'm against additional browser-provided runtimes except NACL. you could use javascript for your day to day work and NACL for your special needs. i'm not sure if NACL would be a complete stand-in for JS thought - would it be possible to communicate with the DOM (or at least JS)? if yes, there you have it - problem solved.

silentbicycle16• 16 years ago

I think a standardized bytecode for Javascript could make sense, but designing a VM for JS and then trying to port (say) Ruby or ML to it later would be awkward, and I don't think most web devs are aware of that.

Compiling to Javascript is a practical choice now. I'm not a fan of the language, but that avoids a lot of its pain points.

I also wonder why these discussions seem to assume we're going to stay with the web stack as-is forever, but that's neither here nor there.

nickik• 16 years ago

JS is just not a good language as a compiler target. If you hade an Bytcode with all the right low level types and features it would be easier to optimise for the VM implementers (mozilla, google ...), you could modify JS without changing the VMs, languages would not be blocked by the speed of JS, faster languages would be possible. It would be easier to make languages that are very diffrent from JS work in the browser.

Your solution work but a haskell interpreter in js will never have good performence but if you could make a GHC backend that comipiles to "web bytecode".

BrendanEich3• 16 years ago

I'm on Ecma TC39 and in touch with JS hackers working for all the major browser vendors. FWIW, as far as I can foresee there will be no standard JS bytecode. Commenters here touch on good reasons:

* divergent, evolving VMs can't agree (not all NIH, see third bullet);

* IPR concerns;

* lowering from source over-constrains future implementation, optimization, and language evolution paths;

* view-source still matters (less, but still).

A binary encoding of JS ASTs, maybe (arithmetic coders can achieve good compression; see Ben Livshits' JSZap from MSR, and earlier work by Michael Franz and Christian Stork at UCI). But this too is just a gleam in my eye, not on TC39's radar.

Meanwhile, we are making JS a lot better as a target language, with things like ES5 strict mode, the ES-Harmony module system and lexical scope all the way up (no global object in scope; built on ES5 strict), and WebGL typed arrays (shipping in Firefox 4).

We have a Mozilla hacker, Alon Zakai, building an LLVM-based C++-to-JS compiler. Others are doing such things (along with good old SNES emulators and the like).

So being a good mid-to-high-level, memory-safe compiler target language is on TC39's radar. Not to the exclusion of other JS desiderata, and never in a way that compromises mass-market usability or buy-by-the-yard rapid-protoyping "scriptability". But one among several goals.

DjDarkman2• 16 years ago

JavaScript is so moldable, you could easily make a compiler that translates to JavaScript. You could even write a language and translate it in the browser, see CoffeeScript.

Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?

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