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

[Vijay Menon]

Yes, we will upload this to a WebKit bug shortly.

Cheers,

Vijay

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
> 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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