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Re:Java Polyfill for the Browser by Freak_NL on Monday May 09, 2016 @03:49AM (#11658191)
From a technical because-we-can standpoint this is really cool, but I am having a hard time imagining actual use cases that warrant running a JVM in the browser. For modern web applications it is too slow (judging from your paper), so perhaps abandoned legacy applications?

Have you encountered any practical use cases?

Re:Java Polyfill for the Browser by jvilk on Monday May 09, 2016 @12:50PM (#11661223)
Yes; the paper mentions CodeMoo.com, which the University of Illinois created independently of us to teach basic programming skills to kids [0]. The file system component is readily used by the Internet Archive for their MS-DOS collection [1]. A number of other instructors approached me regarding using Doppio for in-browser IDEs, but Doppio is somewhat cumbersome to integrate into webpages, and never had the time to dramatically improve its documentation and ease-of-use. I believe that is a more fundamental barrier to using Doppio than its performance, especially since you can run Doppio in a WebWorker to avoid some of the responsiveness issues.

Also, note that Doppio is an interpreter, so there is significant interpreter overhead. Using a JIT compilation approach would improve performance, and a contributor is currently working on a basic implementation. I honestly believe that it could become significantly faster with additional work, but as a single person with other projects, I lack the resources to do this work myself.

[0] http://www.codemoo.com/

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4924