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Comment by code_sloth | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that came to my mind was "why put yet another abstraction in the browser?".

Then I realised the answer was probably "because they could".

Someone will write a C compiler in Java and stuff it in the browser next...

Actually, Doppio is an artifact from my own research, so there is a very good reason "why" [0]! Basically, if you want to re-use your existing, well-tested code in the browser, it is quite difficult. The browser environment is very different from the environment that most programs expect. Doppio bridges the gap between the environment that these programs expect and the environment that the browser presents, making it possible to bring a full JVM into the browser that can run complicated, unmodified programs.

[0] Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier paper from PLDI 2014: https://plasma-umass.github.io/doppio-demo/paper.pdf

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?

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

There is already Emscripten, for compiling from C or C++ to JavaScript...

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