--- holger krekel <hpk@trillke.net> wrote:
Hi Alex!
On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 18:42 -0700, Alex Martelli wrote:
--- Armin Rigo <arigo@tunes.org> wrote: ...
If anyone shows up with a Javascript parser, I'm sure we could together hack (and translate (and later have a JIT from)) a basic Javascript interpreter within a few weeks :-)
Actually, I think the currently useful thing might be a way to compile (any decent language, Python for choice) INTO Javascript (with reasonable efficiency), so one could write AJAX pages without actually having to code in Javascript...;-)
that's a second possibility but there are two crucial perequesites regarding current PyPy:
- a translation approach that focuses more on high-level languages (instead of the current RTyper "C" one)
- a browser/DOM simulation layer in Python to allow rapid prototyping.
Yep, the former would surely require lots of work (though maybe not the latter).
I believe the idea with a PyPy/JS Interpreter is more interesting, at least from the PyPy perspective. Btw,
Possibly, but I advisedly used the adjective "useful" rather than saying "interesting";-) JS's only advantage is one of *deployment* -- browsers have JS interpreters, so you can write AJAX code and dramatically improve the user experience. "Sweating blood" is a charitable description of what it takes, but several examples prove it can work in RL. I just find myself daydreaming that I could do the coding in Python (or almost any other VHLL) rather than JS, that's all;-)
being faster than current JS interpreters is probably easier than being faster than CPython :-)
Yes, good point.
Such a JS-interpreter implementation could be integrated with browsers allowing JS and Python directly in the browser.
Any Python implementation might be integrated with browsers, but it just seems to take a long time happening (even for Firefox, which should allow it most easily)...;-)
That being said, it might actually be worthwhile to compile RPython to Javascript which should be reasonably fast for small programs. One possibility is to just create flowgraphs from a python program and then transform the flowgraph to javascript source code (without much annotation).
True, annotation wouldn't help much here (translating among VHLLs). Alex