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Funny enough, Someone had told me about a grad student having to recreate the JVM in JavaScript at our school. Low and behold, the credits at the bottom of the page are for a few grad students at my school.

I think its a silly thing really, running a JVM on top of a JITer inside a browser. I can see it having some uses in specific cases but I can't imagine it being used for anything heavy duty.

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It might be useful 5 years from now. There was another story a few weeks ago about Mozilla implementing a JavaScript interpreter inside JavaScript itself for security and sandboxing. This could lead to same thing. Although it's literally 100 to 200 thousand times slower than native code right now, but that might not be a big problem a few years from now (in the next few years we will probably see a huge increase of attention towards web app security).

Oh, and if this thing catches on, we won't be seeing another FlashBlock again :)

Indeed, it started out as a class project, but we're hoping to take it a lot further.

The plan is to implement a bytecode -> JS compiler next, a la JSIL / Emscripten. Thus far most of the work has gone into porting the runtime environment first.

P.S. I'm a sophomore, the other two are grad students :)

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