About five months ago I posted here about improving ECMAScript as a compilation target.
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-September/007652.html I was disappointed that there weren't any responses to that email. Folks were probably busy with other concerns. I also thought there might be some motivation to avoid making ECMAScript an improved compilation target as that may reduce the number of programmers working directly in ECMAScript. Perhaps that goes against the goals of this group. The general browser scripting world is still programming in ECMAScript; however, the number of projects that compile to ECMAScript are increasing. I expect to see this trend continue to grow. I wrote the following as a blog post recently. I don't presume anyone here reads my blog so am submitting it here. I am interested to know if attitudes have changed or people are warming up to the idea of changing ECMAScript intentionally to make it a better compilation target. ---- The JVM is now a compilation target for many dynamic languages. The implementers of those dynamic languages have been waiting for invokedynamic so they can make their dynamic languages compile to more efficient JVM byte code. Sun seems to have caught on that people want to use the JVM but not use Java and Sun seems to be looking at ways to accommodate the compilation of these dynamic languages. Microsoft's .NET CLR+DLR is ahead of Sun and has implemented features for efficient dynamic language compilation. Developers have made it clear that even if they are locked into the platform, they are going to still use their language of choice. The same is happening in the browser. Developers are compiling many languages down to ECMAScript ("they byte code of the browser"). GWT and Cappuccino are two well know examples. These projects are overruling the idea that they must write in ECMAScript to create browser apps. They don't have to wait for the ECMAScript committee to standardize methodMissing, for browsers to implement it and for old browsers to disappear. Ten years? No way! They have methodMissing now!! Is it inevitable that browser makers and/or the ECMAScript standard group will add features to ECMAScript specifically to make it a better compilation target or expose actual byte code? By making ECMAScript engines faster, browser makers have already started. Should the effort to make the browser a better compilation target be encouraged and expedited so the long drawn out "eventually" can come sooner? ---- Peter _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
