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Comment by knappador | Hacker News Reader

Can we just get LLVM on browsers to compile embedded IF with JS-to-IF (or existing VM) as legacy? Think about it. Every three months, "omg THIS in Javascript!" and every fourth month, "omg THIS language becomes Javascript!" Can we just get an acceptable LLVM sandbox that uses the browser as sort of the OS and -actually- can do everything we need the runtime environment to do instead of giving us more and more relatively fake advances in user-facing software?

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This is precisely the aim of Google's pNaCl (portable native client): http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl.

I think asm.js aims to fill this niche.

Well, that and Emscripten[1], which is the tool Mozilla used to bring Unreal Engine 3 into the web[2].

Note taht Emscripten is actually entitled An LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler

[1] https://github.com/kripken/emscripten

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/03/27/mozilla-is-unlockin...

I'd rather have Lua in the browser.

LLVM isn't portable.

Not sure to what degree we're talking. ARM + x86 has basically everything covered. Even -if- ARM support is bad now, completing it would be easier than creating exactly the custom toolchains that LLVM was designed to abstract away. Who runs browsers on PPC or whatever that isn't consciously taking responsibility for their access to portable software? http://llvm.org/docs/HowToBuildOnARM.html

i think he means the LLVM bitcode produced.. the IR.

That IR have target processor specifics in it..

but i think the pnacl guys already think about that, and they have a different "bitcode" (as LLVM people say) from the original LLVM..

anyway.. whats more portable than source code? people should stop fancy binary and closed source.. there are no much secrets left these days anyway.. and if you are a hit, nobody can take you that, just by branch the code and call it other name.. unless you are doing something really wrong..

LLVM can be compiled to JavaScript via Emscripten. It doesn't get much more portable than that. Not to mention a half dozen or so hardware CPU architectures (http://llvm.org/docs/CompilerWriterInfo.html#hardware)

Security problems up the wazoo.

s/IF/IR/g

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