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tkirchner

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I really doubt the practical usefulness of such an operation system other than pure fun and skill development (and maybe some tools that fall out at the end...).

Isn't the main purpose of an OS to bridge between the applications and the hardware? The hardware is pretty accurately abstracted as sth. with a state and input/output streams.

What is the purpose of abstracting the hardware as sth. without a state?

I really doubt the practical usefulness of such an operation system other than pure fun and skill development (and maybe some tools that fall out at the end...).

Isn't the main purpose of an OS to bridge between the applications and the hardware? The hardware is pretty accurately abstracted as sth. with a state and input/output streams.

What is the advantage of abstracting the hardware as sth. without a state?

I really doubt the practical usefulness of such an operation system other than pure fun and skill development (and maybe some tools that fall out at the end...).

Isn't the main purpose of an OS to bridge between the applications and the hardware? The hardware is pretty accurately abstracted as sth. with a state and input/output streams.

What is the purpose of abstracting the hardware as sth. without a state?

There is really not much more to say...

...maybe that the reason for all of this is that the CSS API (box model ..., box properties ...) is too complex and as a result browser implementations tend to f* it up easily.

Maybe when analysing the stats it helps to distinguish between the intention of the one implementing the transcompiler (e.g. fun, proof-of-concept, research, money, actual need in a project, ...) and the size of the user-base of the transcompiler (in relation to the user-base of the language that is transcompiled to).

Lets say JS's user-base is pretty huge in relation to other languages (which is not an argument for JS). The stats show that a lot of languages transcompile to javascript, so I would indicate a real need for such projects, otherwise there would probably just exist a few as fun/proof-of-concept-projects.

Similar situation for C/C++ (maybe due to lack of high-level features) and Java (due to lack of practical features).

On the other hand: languages that only have a few or no transcompilers that compile to them, does not mean, they are better useable. There could be other things that make writing transcompilers very hard.

Maybe the fact that there are many compilers that target language A means that either language A is easy to target (so transforming to it is a fun hack) or no-one wants to program directly in language A or both (or more). I believe an example of A is JavaScript.

This indicates that JavaScript is a pain in the ass, which it is.

This is neither an argument against JavaScript nor was it indended as one, just a personal observation from a long-time JavaScript programmer.