And also: ”Developers using Dash tooling will be able to use a cross-compiler to target Javascript for browsers that do not support Dash natively.”
Not very different to having native support for e.g. CoffeScript in browser X and supporting other browsers via JS.
Of course the main issue is that this is yet another language. Since all browsers are essentially becoming poor man’s virtual machines, why not drop the pretense and adapt some kind of bytecode instead. There’s JVM/CLR/LLVM/NaCL — just pick one already! Alas, politics (Oracle/Microsoft/Apple/Google).
Well anyway, Dash is a very positive news nevertheless. The biggest issue with current cross-compilers (GWT, Pyjamas, Haxe etc.) is that they lack good tools to develop and debug. Having support for those natively, there’s hardly any reason to target JS directly anymore. And once Chromium has the infrastructure to support more than one language, it’s possible that the abstractions will be general enough to add support for other languages as well.
“Our approach is to make an absolutely fantastic VM/Language and development environment and build great apps that fully leverage it in order to help other browsers see the wisdom in following. Once Dash has had a chance to prove its stability and feasibility, we are committed to making Dash an open standard with involvement from the broader web community.”
Mainly browser-vendor politics - MS/Apple/Opera/Mozilla. A proper runtime would weaken their chokehold over the Web client. It's almost certainly not a coincidence that the one major browser vendor which does support a VM is the one which is mainly interested in the Web client as a platform for its applications. Of the other four, two have strong interests in holding back the Web as an alternative to OS-native applications, while the remaining two are more or less nothing without their position of power over Web standards.
I can't figure out what you're implying. Why would the two organizations that are "more or less nothing without their position of power over Web standards" be opposed to making the Web better able to compete with native apps? After all, if the Web loses to iOS and Android, then Opera and Mozilla become irrelevant.
The reason why Opera and Mozilla oppose bytecode standards is that they genuinely think they're a bad idea. I mean, we tried that once; it was called Java. It lost to JavaScript.
Java (in the browser) was a plugin that was mostly completely sandboxed from the real page DOM with its own entirely separate (and very poorly designed -- AWT was horrendous) attempt at a UI layer. That's the problem it had, not the fact that it was a byte-code based VM.
Make the byte-code VM a first class citizen and things are completely different.
Even having the option to load a single JVM instance and share it between different frames/pages/tabs would be a tremendous improvement over current situation. At the present, the best you could do is to fake it using inter-frame communication (and some heuristic to elect most-likely to live longest), which is only slightly less bad.
I'm not sure what you mean by Haxe debugging. That happens with whatever run time debugger you have for js, php, etc. As far as development goes, there's flashdevelop, an eclipse plugin, a few textmate bundles, a vim package, etc.
http://haxe.org/com/ide
If you don't mind me asking, what part of debugging/development in haxe turned you off?
I’m not familiar with haXe all that well, just enough to include it in the list. However, in the end haXe is too, statically translated into Javascript. GWT has an excellent debugger as well, but there’s only so much you can do on that level of indirection.
Not very different to having native support for e.g. CoffeScript in browser X and supporting other browsers via JS.
Of course the main issue is that this is yet another language. Since all browsers are essentially becoming poor man’s virtual machines, why not drop the pretense and adapt some kind of bytecode instead. There’s JVM/CLR/LLVM/NaCL — just pick one already! Alas, politics (Oracle/Microsoft/Apple/Google).
Well anyway, Dash is a very positive news nevertheless. The biggest issue with current cross-compilers (GWT, Pyjamas, Haxe etc.) is that they lack good tools to develop and debug. Having support for those natively, there’s hardly any reason to target JS directly anymore. And once Chromium has the infrastructure to support more than one language, it’s possible that the abstractions will be general enough to add support for other languages as well.
“Our approach is to make an absolutely fantastic VM/Language and development environment and build great apps that fully leverage it in order to help other browsers see the wisdom in following. Once Dash has had a chance to prove its stability and feasibility, we are committed to making Dash an open standard with involvement from the broader web community.”