

Google Chrome: Why I’m Not Excited - ghempton
http://blog.hempton.com/?p=27

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enomar
Better title: "I don't like Javascript, but I'll mention something about
Chrome so people actually pay attention to what I'm saying."

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volida
my thought exactly

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olefoo
" I have been using Chrome as my default browser for the last several days"

    
    
       several==2 #for larger values of 2

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scott_s
I actually thought he brought up a good point the third paragraph: perhaps
it's best to have a representation between Javascript and machine code that
other languages can target. The VM should do what V8 does - optimize to
machine code - but it might open up the potential for other languages to be
embedded in browsers.

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mechanical_fish
_perhaps it's best to have a representation between Javascript and machine
code that other languages can target_

And the payoff for that extra complexity and a probable loss of performance
is... what, exactly?

Particularly when you consider that even if Chrome did have a VM that could
run compiled Flash, Python, Ruby, and Lisp... very few programmers would ever
use those languages, because the resulting code wouldn't work in any other
browser?

Unless you require a plugin, Javascript is the greatest common factor in
modern browsers. That's not going to change in the foreseeable future, both
because it's a very tedious long-term project to establish and promote a
cross-browser alternative, and because the payoff is probably not big enough
to justify that effort: As guys like Yegge and Crockford have pointed out,
Javascript is a pretty good language to have gotten stuck with, once you learn
to steer around the kludged bits.

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scott_s
I thought I mentioned the payoff, as did the author: using an arbitrary
language in the browser.

I don't think this is necessarily the way to go, but I think it's an
interesting idea. I pointed it out because this blog post is the first place
I've seen it.

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alexk
I wish Google support Mozilla with their JS2 - it would be really cool news
for developers

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maxwell
What do you like about JS2?

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alexk
tons of stuff, but my favorite are bytecode, modules, classes and type hinting

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dougp
I will be excited when it works in more than just windows.

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froo
I thought it was quite clear why it wasn't built for the other platforms just
yet.

The other platforms are generally dominated by tech savvy users but in the big
scheme of things we make up a very small part of the internet as a whole. I'm
sure they just wanted to spend more time focussing on getting a larger number
of customers adopting early than spreading resources thinly.

If anything I think it shows a great amount of respect on Google's behalf of
its Linux and Mac users, because I dont think they would have wanted to
release a buggy piece of crap to their users if they had limited resources on
the project.

