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

[Zoltan Herczeg]

Hi Anton,

> I am sorry if it didn't sound clear enough in our original message,
> but we're not proposing a new language support, but we're proposing a
> patch which allows others runtimes to run along with JS in the
> browser.

and they mostly replied to that (including some solution ideas like
converting your language to JS. You might even see some speedup :) ).

> Of course, we're doing this because of our work on Dart, but our
> intent was to solicit a feedback from the WebKit community if there is
> any interest in supporting runtimes additional to JS (and not JS +
> Dart) in the first place.

The question they raised was what we need to sacrifice for this support.
JS is heavily tied with WK internals, lots of JS specific things
everywhere (yeah, you can change the JS engine in WK, but only to another
JS engine). Change that to something general affects maintenance (new
abstraction layers / API) and performance (probably memory as well), and
its drawbacks are unknown yet (and its advantages are questionable),
especially in a mixed environment.

I think you should start this work in a private branch (code.google.com?)
and tell us your experiences later. It is difficult to judge this feature
at the moment.

Regards,
Zoltan