Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by DrNosferatu | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

DrNosferatu

For some reason, I think that instead a Java runtime written in WebAssembly would be more useful.

View on HN

https://cheerpj.com/

https://thenewstack.io/cheerpj-3-0-run-apps-in-the-browser-w...

Thanks for explaining ;)

There are a few, and they are really interesting! The reason we wrote Chicory though is we're interested in extending the capabilities of existing Java applications through plugins. The intro of this talk explains some of this reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00LYdZS0YlI

Not sure why you're being downvoted. One of the best tools Microsoft made regarding WebAssembly and C# is Blazor. Developers can focus on building web applications and use C# on both the front-end and back-end and drive the UI either server side or WASM without missing a beat. Essentially bypassing the need for JavaScript.

I can only imagine such a capability for Java or other languages would be infinitely useful.

Google web toolkit was released 18 yers ago that essentially allowed you to create early web2.0 apps (like Gmail) in Java. AJAX and a lot of web2.0 innovations were essentially originated from GWT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit

I would even argue that large scale JS web apps were plain impossible without Google Closure (the compiler they used to compile both Java and JS to JS, and to add types to JS) at the time.

Arguably, GWT was too ambitious. That made it somewhat of a PITA to work with.

J2CL is a much better approach (IMO) but is somewhat too little too late.

The best analogy to what GWT was is ASP.NET Webforms but ran on the client. That extra baggage (along with an antiquated build system and setup) made it really hard to keep GWT up to date.

I'm excited to see Java bytecode->WASM though. Now that WASM ships with a GC we should see some really neat stuff in terms of the size of the runtime needed for an AOT bytecode->wasm.

TeaVM https://www.teavm.org/

Then you'll be run Java in the browser! Wait, isn't that applets?

Java runtime without miltithreading? No thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com