On Tuesday, 18 December 2012 at 18:11:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
An interesting datapoint in regards to bytecode is Javascript.
Note that Javascript is not distributed in bytecode form. There
is no Javascript VM. It is distributed as source code.
Sometimes, that source code is compressed and obfuscated,
nevertheless it is still source code.
How the end system chooses to execute the js is up to that end
system, and indeed there are a great variety of methods in use.
Javascript proves that bytecode is not required for "write
once, run everywhere", which was one of the pitches for
bytecode.
What is required for w.o.r.e. is a specification for the source
code that precludes undefined and implementation defined
behavior.
Note also that Typescript compiles to Javascript. I suspect
there are other languages that do so, too.
True, however JavaScript's case is similar to C.
Many compilers make use of C as an high level assembler and
JavaScript,
like it or not, is the C of Internet.
--
Paulo
