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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."
We can write PHP! And then browser security will be top notch.
You mean my preferred language has just become cool?
Ok, this is either great news or the world is about to end.
I think I'll go stand in a doorway for an hour or two, just to be on the safe side.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Everything's being constantly reinvented but no actual progress is being made. Oh look, the 100th toolkit to do exactly the same thing! Oh look, a new way of layering something old on something old on something old to give something new! Oh look, another silver bullet framework!
Can anyone here remember the web of 10 years ago, for example? Content = text for reading + graphics for illustration. No bullcrap, just Google/Wikipedia style web sites to give me a simple navbar + content.
primary? ummm... I thought the primary point of layers is so that you can do a lot with only a few simple function calls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
So Flash can simulating computing as it was back in 1998? Super....
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
The circle is now complete. When C left Unix it was but the back-end. Now, it is the API.
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Well this just underscores how silly the whole web-application thing is. An application running on a browser is a silly idea for the same reason an OS running on a browser is. We already have operating systems to run programs on. Give us native programs, not some horrid mishmash of technologies.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You should email them and tell them about this! Surely they haven't though of such a thing!
Sarcasm aside (sorry, I couldn't help myself), I suspect the VM needs to actually hand you a block of memory, and on accesses it validates that it is within the VM allocated range. Anything less would be silly, however such a thing would provide a huge win (I've tried to do image editing in pure managed code, and then found a massive performance win switching it over to P/Invoke native code).
It's a secret to everyone.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Being able to run Python or Quake inside a Flash VM sounds useful at first blush, but it seems you'd lose most of what makes webapps nice for both developers and users. In particular, C based apps are not designed to be streamed, whereas Flash or AJAX apps usually are (to some extent). Nobody wants to browse to a "web app" and then spend 5 minutes twiddling their thumbs whilst 20 megabyte of Python runtime or Quake is pulled down over the wire. Web apps just have a different DNA to desktop apps.
I can see this being used to accelerate computation-heavy subelements of a regular Flash app though. I wonder how much of this is being driven by a desire to run a Photoshop subset inside Flash?
If you run a browser based OS... and install a browser in it. And then use that to run a browser based OS, why... we could have infinite amounts of computing power! Or space time will tear itself apart. Either way, I'm making popcorn.
yvan eht nioj
Those who don't remember ActiveX are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Not really. I do agree that native applications are nicer than web applications, especially if you compare, e.g., Google Docs to Office, or even WordPad.
However what we have discovered is that (1) web applications are easier to write, and (2) it's nice having a consistent platform to develop to, even if that platform is mildly ridiculous (HTML + CSS + JavaScript + Browser-Workarounds + JavaScript canvas thing). Getting stuff to display and layout on this platform is easy, and simple to prettify, far easier than most native platforms have been in the past. There are also a dozen different ways to write the server side of things, and I think for many developers it is nice to be forced to split up the client interface from the meat of the system.
Of course, things are going too far. What should be happening is the simplification of native application programming, with a common platform, etc, without the overhead of having to run a Javascript or HTML rendering engine, and native full-speed canvases. I think that Apple is getting there, QT and KDE4 may be getting there but I haven't really looked into that platform. Java should have gotten there but early design mistakes (AWT, Swing) have killed that off, and SWT is a last-generation UI library. Maybe something like Fenggui on Java might help this platform, but I think Java's dead on the home desktop (and extremely alive and profitable on the server).
#1, Yes, it is hard to push out an application to every University computer when you are at one w/ 50,000 students.
#2, see #1
#3, everything is done on the server-side, and prior to AJAX, it was redone in Javascript on the clientside for a more responsive user interface. Now, both the client and server use the server-side procedure.
only an API of evil, Darth!
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.
So it's browsers all the way down?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Firefox inside Firefox inside Firefox...