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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."
There are some very talented web-developers, and there are some very intuitive web applications. But yes, there are many slow, crappy, and insecure ones out there too.
Linux doesn't work well in the business world for ordinary users. Trust me. It doesn't. They need stuff that is windows only.
Prototype solves a lot of the DOM incompatibilities between IE/Firefox.
My point is, web apps do RAD very well. Native apps give you flexibility. But such flexibility is not required for run-of-the-mill data management apps. I don't want to write something to manage updates, the very nature of a web app eliminates the need to do that. If I am going to write something at home, I'll do it in C. But I'd rather do a project as quickly as possible, it gives me more time to post on Slashdot ;)
we could have infinite amounts of computing power!
So, you're saying it's browsers all the way down?