Re:JavaScript at 20
by cwyers on Friday May 15, 2015 @02:18PM
(#9552548)
I think you're right that they weren't trying to do this with NaCl. They really were trying to do this with Dart, though.
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Re:JavaScript at 20
by TazeTSchnitzel on Friday May 15, 2015 @02:20PM
(#9552572)
Well, Dart would've been one other language in the browser, sure. But it's a language not that different from JavaScript in actuality. The benefits seem few for the work needed to support two different languages. Compiling to JS, which fits Dart quite well (probably because it was designed to compile to JS well), seems more productive to me.
Some were excited Dart might lead to some sort of bytecode VM being added, but that didn't lead anywhere. And since then, JS has become more bytecode-like, so it doesn't really matter now anyway.
As more and more people write software in languages that compile to JavaScript instead of directly hand-writing JavaScript the demand for JavaScript becoming a better compile target grows.
In that sense adoption of Dart, ClojureScript, TypeScript, Elm et all will continue to accelerate JavaScript (language and runtime) improvements.
Re:JavaScript at 20
by BrendanEich on Saturday May 16, 2015 @03:31AM
(#9555319)
All part of the plan. I've been saying this since 2012, Dave Herman and Alon Zakai of Mozilla Research (asm.js creators along with Luke Wagner) said it before me:
http://brendaneich.github.io/Strange-Loop-2012/#/21
Love it when a plan comes together!