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by Nypro
3411 days ago
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So Google is going with a DartVM on this one. Dart is cool and all, but why DartVM? It's the same restrictive model we have with Android (dalvikVM) where you can only develop with languages that can compile down to Java bytecode. In this case, however, we will be using languages that can transpile to Dart source instead! Why not JavaScript engine? With the current movement with WebAssembly, I see a lot potential use cases. The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm. The engine could be exposed to communicate with the OS directly or sth. If they are going to consider V8 alongside DartVM, then that would be cool. I truly hope they don't repeat old mistakes. |
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Having your bottom level language semantics be dynamically typed seems to place a real cap on application performance. Given that the underlying machine code is typed, I don't think it makes sense for the lowest level language you can target to be dynamically typed.
(WebAssembly is basically an acknowledgement of that fact.)
> The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm.
Conversely, I don't think WASM is a great target language either. It doesn't include GC, and I don't think it makes sense for each application to have to ship its own GC and runtime. WASM is a good target for C/C++, but not for higher level languages like Java/C#/JS/Python/Ruby/Dart.
They say they intend to support GC, but they've been saying that for a while and I haven't seen much motion yet. I don't think Fuchsia can afford to wait around for that.