[Vm-dev] Re: [squeak-dev] compiled squeakjs

[Florin Mateoc]

Hi Eliot,

On 1/18/2015 1:38 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

<snip>

> I like your approach, that if making everything work, not taking the simpe approach of translating what will work
> directly and disallowing the rest (as does Amber and Clamato etc). You might want to talk to Ryan Macnak and Gilad
> Bracha about their Newspeak implementation above JavaScript (they're also doing one above Dart). 

Thank you for the reference to the Newspeak compilation to JavaScript, I might steal some ideas.

> I do think Bert's approach is fun, too.  But I do feel extremely frustrated that no one is taking the obvious route of making a plugin to allow the Cog VM to be used directly, gaining much higher performance and reducing the number of execution platforms we have to support.
>
> A plugin would use JavaScript to collect events, to render and to access the DOM (all of this code can be stolen from Bert's VM). The JavaScript component would connect to the VM via a socket.  The VM itself would be quite small (it's already only around a megabyte of executable).  For me arguments about the inconvenience and slowness of downloading and installing are not compelling given the ubiquity of Flash.  
>
> And then there really is /no/ difference in the execution semantics, and /no/ performance degradation, and the code is as portable as Bert's VM provided Cig runs on the platform.
>
> I'd be doing this myself if I weren't working on getting Spur released, getting 64-but Spur working, working with Clément on Sista and looking at hosting Cog over Xen.  Come on folks; someone out there must think this is useful and interesting.

Let's hope this gets accepted as a GSOC project

Florin