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Comment by drivingmenuts | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice to see other languages available as real languages, not compiled down to Javascript. I love me some javascript, but it would be nice to work in Python, in the browser.

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It would be nice to see Lua embedded as an option within browsers, since it's such a small language and already designed to be embedded.

Lua is indeed, embeddable anywhere. Its such an elegant little VM, and you can just put it wherever you want. It is some sort of mad invasive engine .. you use it once, and from that point on you pretty much can't see anywhere else you wouldn't just use it, of course .. if you had to, or wanted to, and .. the more you use the Lua VM stack, the more you just want to keep doing things that way. It is neat.

There's http://www.skulpt.org/for Python in the browser.

You happened to append for to the url. As a convenience:

http://www.skulpt.org

That stuff uses JS. It would be nice to see a Python runtime in-browser with no JS involved whatsoever.

How do you envision this happening? Either the runtime would have to be written in JS or you'd have to get all the browser implementers to adopt your virtual machine — which, I mean, why would they?

"why would they" - and that is the saddest part. We are locked-in now.

I agree and used to agree very enthusiastically, but now I kind of understand the browser makers' position. Like, I don't love having my favorite runtimes locked out, but I also don't think having 15 virtual machines bundled with every browser would be a great outcome either. We've already seen how in-browser VMs turn out when they're not adequately maintained with Flash and Java, and it isn't pretty and it leads to people's money getting stolen. So I can't really blame the browser makers for not wanting to go down that road.

What we have now isn't the very best thing I can imagine, but I think it's an OK compromise. We have a set of runtimes that implement a fairly consistent Turing-complete set of instructions, so we can implement just about anything we want and express it almost any way we want. And in the end, I think that's the most important thing.

Personally, I'd like to see a Scheme or ML dialect, but I'm not one to exclude good languages: I'd love to see some way to portably, reliably, and safely extend all browsers to support new language VMs - including languages like Dart, Python, Ruby, Lisp, etc. - without resorting to huge blobs of JavaScript that half-heartedly implement a half-useful language.

Things like ASM.js are interesting, but not really helpful, in my mind, as it just adds another unnecessary layer of overhead just to be able to implement something interesting in a language suited to it. I just wish browser vendors saw this the way I do.

What is the difference between a "real language" and "compiled down to JavaScript"? Like, every language is either interpreted or compiles down to something else. I'm not clear on what the real distinction is here. Are ClojureScript, Dart and Scala not real languages since they compile to JavaScript?

"Real" is probably the wrong term, chosen too quickly. Byte-code compatible is probably a better descriptor.

That would be an actual true Open Web. It's not going to happen.

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