The Elusive Universal Web Bytecode

Re:The Elusive Universal Web Bytecode by Rusky on Thursday March 26, 2015 @01:15PM (#9271322)

The article makes the argument that existing systems are easier to improve incrementally, while designing new systems is more work and not guaranteed to succeed.

The problem is JavaScript-as-bytecode is not especially easy to improve. Anything you want to add/change that would make it a better bytecode has to be balanced with the language's use by humans.

The solution to one-VM-to-rule-them-all is not to cram everything into a higher-level system with lots of assumptions (JavaScript) or to ignore portability (NaCl, LLVM), but to use a bytecode that's low-level enough to implement the various assumptions needed by higher layers.

That way both C++ and JavaScript can run at full speed as well as have their implementations changed (even across websites!) without pushing every change through the browsers- just like native apps, with the browser providing only cross-platform and security, nothing more.

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Re:The Elusive Universal Web Bytecode by TazeTSchnitzel on Thursday March 26, 2015 @02:00PM (#9271759)

> The problem is JavaScript-as-bytecode is not especially easy to improve. Anything you want to add/change that would make it a better bytecode has to be balanced with the language's use by humans.

There are very few cases where human use causes problems. goto is the only one I can think of. Yet we've gotten loads of great improvements in ES6 to make it a good compiler target, like float32 and better integer multiplication.

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