The Next Browser Scripting Language Is — C?

mad.frog writes to tell us that in a recent talk by Adobe's Scott Petersen he demonstrated a new toolchain that he has been working on (and soon to be open-sourced) that allows C code to be run by the Tamarin virtual machine. "The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there's some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM's "emulation" of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing. The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music."

Comments

Adobe Systems != Open Source

[mpapet]

The last time I checked, Adobe Systems is about as hostile to open source as possible. They are the seldom acknowledged masters of the "first hit on the crack pipe is free" scheme.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/air.html

Multiple helper libraries licensed under the MPL doesn't change the fact they are promoting another information silo.

Re:Browser-based OS

[Hairy Heron]

especially when the proprietary part is very large and complex (eg Java)

You're about 3 years out of date on calling Java proprietary, kiddo. In case you forgot, it's been GPLed for over a year now.