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ianb

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ianb
·16 tahun yang lalu·discuss
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.
ianb
·16 tahun yang lalu·discuss
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.