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Comment by rbranson | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? the JVM? You listed the pros, but what about all the cons? Modern JVMs are fast, but highly specialized for long-running applications, which web pages are decidedly not. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

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Yes, seriously. In what sense are JVMs "specialized for long-running applications"? If you mean they start slowly, that's hardly the case even if you start from scratch:

   > time java HelloWorld
   Hello, World!
   java HelloWorld  0.28s user 0.06s system 135% cpu 0.248 total

In any case, the JVM is just an example (although I still argue it can serve this purpose well). My main point is that the "correct" model for the web is a bytecode-running VM inside every browser that lets you do everything javascript does through APIs.

If you're just suggesting that we need to ship a common bytecode to browsers, then I agree.

Seriously? .28s is 280 milliseconds, for a result with zero content. That is already at the outside acceptable threshold for being perceived as slow response, and that's before we spend any time at all rendering the page. Certainly a VM of some kind could boot faster, but milliseconds count.

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