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

[Charles Pritchard]

On 12/6/11 4:23 AM, Zoltan Herczeg wrote:
>> >  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

They're already in that position with Dart, translating source code into JS.

I think there's some real benefit long term going down this route, 
working on WebKit's flexibility, because LLVM is turning into a real 
option for the web.

Taking this back to the "engineering" purpose. LLVM works. It's not 
complete yet, but it works.

There are two very workable targets: PNaCl and Emscripten.
emscripten as a target is pure JS and supported by modern browsers.

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/trunk/src/native_client/pnacl/

There is good reason to consider native code execution:
it will run faster than emscripten.

-Charles