[webkit-dev] WebKit branch to support multiple VMs (e.g., Dart)

[Eric Seidel]

Could you post a complete patch of your multi-vm changes to a WebKit
bug?  I final chromium's diff viewer very difficult to use.

Regardless of whether this is good for the web or not, some of your
multi-vm changes may be nice to have in WebCore.

-eric

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Geoffrey Garen <ggaren at apple.com> wrote:
> Looking at http://www.webkit.org/projects/goals.html, I see:
>
> Goals
>
> ….
> Hackability
> To make rapid progress possible, we try to keep the code relatively easy to
> understand….
>
> Non-Goals
>
> ….
> WebKit is an engineering project not a science project.For new features to
> be adopted into WebKit, we strongly prefer for the technology or at least
> the use case for it to be proven.
>
> It sounds like you're proposing a change to the goals of the WebKit project
> -- namely, to use a branch in the WebKit project as a substrate for
> experiments with new technologies, including new technologies that might
> negatively impact hackability. Is that right?
>
> Geoff
>
> On Dec 5, 2011, at 9:26 AM, Vijay Menon wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Many languages compile to JavaScript today to run on the web.  As
> alternative, we’ve been experimenting with enabling different language
> runtimes in WebKit to run in web pages alongside JavaScript.
>
> This could be used to support languages like Python, Java, Ruby, Lua, or -
> what inspired us - Dart (www.dartlang.org).
>
> Some reasons to consider additional runtimes include:
>
> - Speed.  Many languages are faster than JavaScript when run natively and/or
> do not compile to JavaScript efficiently.
> - Developer choice.  Another runtime provides developers with more choice
> without requiring them to use a toolchain.
> - Development experience.  Languages supported directly in the browser can
> have a significantly better debugging and profiling experience than they can
> with compiled code.
>
> We have a quite early patch of this work available here:
>
> - multi-vm changes: http://codereview.chromium.org/8806015/
> - dart bindings: http://codereview.chromium.org/8802010/
>
> We’re planning to create a multi-vm branch on webkit.org to experiment with
> this idea.  Our goal with this branch is to (a) demonstrate the above points
> and (b) show that we can do this without degrading JavaScript performance or
> the WebKit development experience.  If successful, we’d like to submit these
> changes to WebKit trunk.  We welcome your feedback.
>
> Regards,
>
> Anton Muhin
> Pavel Podivilov
> Vijay Menon
>
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