Mobile code was dying before, but the final nail in the coffin is the Spectre/Meltdown class of vulnerabilities (with new variants coming out monthly).
It seems modern microprocessors simply aren't designed to run untrusted code.
Mobile code was dying before, but the final nail in the coffin is the Spectre/Meltdown class of vulnerabilities (with new variants coming out monthly).
Is it though? I mean, has anybody stopped using Javascript as a result of Meltdown/Spectre?
True, Java applets largely died off, but that was as much because it took Sun WAY too long to ship the "Consumer JRE", coupled with a rash of Java security issues over a certain window of time, that made people scared to enable Java in their browsers. I doubt many more people disabled Java after Spectre/Meltdown, than before.
Couldn’t one run user scripts on separate servers with non-OoO CPUs: low-end ARM or MIPS or RISCV or whatever?
Sure, but requiring separate hardware to run code is a pretty high cost.
That interview was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17475413.
The notion of a restricted server-side language for user scripts still sounds useful and an unfilled niche.
[1] https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/01-andy-hertzfeld