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Comment by jf | Hacker News Reader

You're right, it's a weak connection right now. I could be wrong, but I'm seeing JavaScript getting pushed "down" the stack. People are doing things like implementing the DOM in pure JavaScript. I'm also very interested in seeing what people are doing with Emscripten, ClojureScript, swank-js, and the like.

Yes, we don't have a Lisp or Smalltalk like environment for JavaScript. Not yet. Given how widely supported JavaScript is though, I could see us getting there organically? Not sure.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lively_Kernel

http://lively-kernel.org/

lispm, I've tried looking up the link you posted a year or so ago to a gallery of Genera software screenshots, but it doesn't seem to be working (lispm.dyndns.org). Have you moved the gallery somewhere else? Please let me know, I'm very interested in seeing how they look!

Given that Mozilla aren't willing to redesign their browser to eliminate the recurring flaws, I find it implausible that they're going to go for a balls-out JavaScript-all-the-way-down approach. The way it's going now is more C++ code to do specialised tasks with a bit of scripting on the front. Is stuff like Emscripten getting us closer to a half-way decent design? It seems like this is all just enabling more complexity. Now we'll have C code compiled to JavaScript compiled to machine code.

I like Embscripten and so forth for hack value, but this is a terrible way to build systems. I mean, people want sandboxed code in the browser, so why not make the whole browser sandboxed? Because nobody cares enough to put the effort in, I guess. Chrome is the only browser going along these lines and Mozilla is doing its best to hose down that effort because it just might allow people to program for a simple portable VM instead of all this application-parading-as-a-platform web standards stuff.

> Given that Mozilla aren't willing to redesign their browser > to eliminate the recurring flaws

http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/servo.html is worth a read.

> Chrome is the only browser going along these lines

Chrome is using a C++ core with no plans to stop doing that that I know of....

I wasn't clear. I wasn't meaning to suggest that Chrome were going to move away from C++. But they are trying to sandbox using NaCl and other mechanisms. I was aware of the Rust effort, but not that they were going to implement more of the DOM in JavaScript (thanks!). Maybe there will be more security-by-design.

I also think JavaScript is a bad basis for a platform in any case, since it requires loads of complexity to be fast. Why not just a simple typed language or VM? I have read some JS JIT papers and they have found plenty of code generation bugs (more security holes).

I don't think Chrome is trying to sandbox their own code using NaCl, so much; they're just trying to sandbox "arbitrary executable" code.... which is sandboxed automatically if it's JS running inside a JS VM instead of a random binary blob.

For the rest, one of the main points of Rust and servo is to have better security-by-design. Whether the DOM ends up implemented in JS or in Rust is still up in the air at this point, but either one would be much better than C++ from a security perspective.

As for JavaScript, it's what we have due to happenstance, but displacing it involves either a huge amount more complexity in web browsers (to support JavaScript _and_ another language both touching the same objects and whatnot without memory leaks) or just dropping JS entirely and implementing some other language (not exactly likely to succeed). Maybe someone will create a VM that can run both JS and something else well. Maybe. It's not all that simple to do.

You and I are starting from different assumptions. I want to throw out the DOM. It is an application-specific component that should be implemented in "user land". Currently we're heading toward C inside JS inside Rust, with plugins written in C++ running outside any sandboxes. This is never going to be secure. You have to design a VM that everything can sit in. There's no reason why a browser can't sit inside a simple VM except that it builds in huge amounts of complexity regardless of how its used.

We don't need a VM to run JS "well". Nothing going on in the browser is even CPU intensive if not for the huge gobs of complexity going on. People are making simple things harder and harder to do, and complex things easier and easier. If you just write everything for a simple typed VM you don't have to bend over backward to make things run fast. There's nothing going on in the client side of say, GMail, that I couldn't do (faster!) on the computer I was using in 1997.

I think we're heading for something closer to C inside JS inside Rust without C++ plugins allowed, honestly.

     > Nothing going on in the browser is even CPU
     > intensive if not for the huge gobs of complexity going on.

That's not quite true. People do in fact do CPU intensive stuff in browsers, if nothing else because they write algorithmically slow code.

Note that GMail is not an example of an application that really does intensive JS. A photo editing app would be a better example.

>That's not quite true. People do in fact do CPU intensive stuff in browsers, if nothing else because they write algorithmically slow code.

It's CPU intensive because of the way it's done, not because it intrinsically requires much CPU. That was my point. And it's not just algorithms; everything goes through a million layers of abstraction.

>Note that GMail is not an example of an application that really does intensive JS. A photo editing app would be a better example.

Again, I was doing photo-editing years ago with no troubles. You wouldn't even be able to start your JS photo editing app on a 1996 computer. And by focusing on "CPU-intensive" tasks you're missing an essential point, which is that stuff that shouldn't require any CPU does. My system shouldn't pause - ever. We have optimised everything for high throughput on powerful machines. The JVM suffers from exactly this problem. Java is plenty "fast" if you ignore latency.

There's just nothing demanding enough to require that going on. And yet the UI locks up for 1-2 seconds pretty frequently on my $1000 desktop machine with loads of RAM and CPU. It's even worse on my $400 laptop. There's nothing intrinsic in the hardware or the tasks that should cause this to happen - it's the design of the software. It's because the system is too complex and preemptable that this happens.

Oops. In the above I said the system shouldn't pause ever. This is silly of course. What I meant to say is that it shouldn't pause except when hit with hard resource limits. Loading from the disk or performing an expensive calculation will take some time of course. But there shouldn't be random pauses when interacting with something that ought to be fit into memory. Modern systems are full of pre-emption, GC pauses and other non-determinisms.

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