Skip to main content

How To Host Every Language in Every Language

Atul writes:
Last week, Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive.
The next steps Scott took are the most interesting, because he starts using this to build stock Python and Ruby runtimes that are hosted on Tamarin. This is a fascinating solution to one of our biggest itches: more languages on more platforms.

Imagining the sheer number of languages (most) this opens up to running on any Tamarin run-time (Flash and Firefox 4) is mind boggling. Go on, let your mind be boggled. Combine this with the basic idea being targetted to other platforms and you've got a lot of possibilities. Target other bytecode, like Java or .Net, and you open up more possible cross-builds than you can count. Platforms begin to fade on the borders.

At the same time, Mozilla is already busy learning to convert DLR bytecode to Tamarin bytecode, so I guess Java is the only bytecode left anyone (maybe) cares enough about getting to run on it. Down the road, could this mean Flash (and Firefox 4) will be the only platform supporting, essentially, any and all languages and libraries, in some form or another? Impressive.

Not only would Tamarin support Python, but potentially all major implementation of the language. Choices are great.

Of course, the same will be done for every platform, and once again the pattern repeats itself. Vendors will fight over control of the platform, just to be made irrelevent by one layer above them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more