Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by huherto 6033 days ago
I think Google is actually thinking javascript is going to be the base machine language of the browser. They seem to be investing a lot of effort on the V8 engine. http://code.google.com/p/v8/
2 comments
ShabbyDoo 6033 days ago
Does V8 compile to a bytecode similar to Java? I know that it does JIT compilation to native code and then caches it for future use. If it happens to have a bytecode representation, we could read the Google tealeaves and conclude that Google sees compiled JavaScript as an ugly steppingstone toward a binary representation of client-side code.
link
andreyf 6033 days ago
Does V8 compile to a bytecode similar to Java?

AFAIK, not any remotely standardized bytecode, no. Of course, there are some data structures in between the strings of characters and the native code, but I don't think there's any talk of guaranteeing anything that would warrant calling them "byte code".

Aside: Lars Bak is the lead developer on V8, and was the lead on HotSpot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)

link
amichail 6033 days ago
Why would Google think such a thing when Silverlight has better tech? Why not build a Silverlight competitor?
link
txxxxd 6033 days ago
See: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
link
amichail 6033 days ago
Not much of an API though.
link