BTW AJAX is the wrong solution, the browser should not be used to run server code, it clogs up the browser and provides too many opportunities for security issues! If you need rich applications, provide web launched rich desktop clients or proper application support in the browser!

This is big news as it means that there is a path around Microsoft stalling in the browser. If they use Silverlight to bring a nice CLR JIT for JavaScript – great! If they don’t, we have Tamarin. What about deployment? Well, in theory Adobe could use their Flash install base to get this distributed to 90% of the web in short order.

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Kevin: from John Lam @ http://www.iunknown.com/2007/07/a-first-look-at.html:

Some of you may be wondering why we are only accepting contributions into the libraries and not the entire compiler. It’s because IronRuby is built on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), and the public interfaces to the DLR are not complete at this time. Since the DLR will ship as part of the CLR in the future, we cannot accept contributions into the IronRuby compiler, at least initially. However, once the DLR matures and reaches 1.0 status with fully supported public interfaces, we will fully open up all parts of the IronRuby project for external contributions.

This is not surprising, and it may even be well-motivated on technical grounds — but in my experience, it’s a mistake to hold back anything when opening up source.

Ed: I hear David Nick Main of JavaSWF fame is working on JVM -> ABC translation targeting Tamarin, no SWF envelope.

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What IronMonkey wiki is expected to be filled with some information on how one can contribute and what’s the roadmap, etc?

Hardware keeps improving anyway. Developers productivity improves way slower.

This is really interesting news for me. Indeed news and indeed interesting :) Definitely, have to check this mailing list archives to keep myself up to date.

VS

You should join the es4-discuss at mozilla.org list (usual mailman -request subscribe message protocol). A lot of what we are doing in JS2/ES4 is in fact thinking about how untyped and typed code can interface, because we expect untyped objects to be common forever. I talk about this briefly in my TAE slides. But please join the es4-discuss list, we can hash things out better there.

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However, before adding some Iron to picture could you pay more attention to JS itself? Do you think that JS with its upcoming changes will be great language?

I’m currently working with ActionScript 3.0. This language can be positioned as JS1.6

More static type checking is good, but why
var abc = new SomeObject;

makes “abc” a dynamically typed variable rather then variable of statically infered type SomeObject??? I know, the reason is backward-compatibility, but there is a real-world example of how such goal leads language to grave: Java 5. Scala language has future (yep, it has no legacy to support); the death of Java 5 is just postponed. Do you think that JS will be used in mixed-mode (pre-JS2 / JS2)? Hardly believe anyone will ever try…

Second, I’m not great fan of Ruby, but some syntax ideas in Ruby are extremely useful and natural. Compared to Ruby (or Scala) expressiveness and brevity the line below (AS3/JS2) just make me sick:
override public function get someProperty():String

Hey, I must say 4 (useless) words to simply override a property? I’d rather program Ajax in SAP ABAP…

VS

However, before adding some Iron to picture could you pay more attention to JS itself? Do you think that JS with its upcoming changes will be great language?

I’m currently working with ActionScript 3.0. This language can be positioned as JS1.6

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Our plan is to push whatever patches are agreeable as far upstream as they’ll go, as I said in my talk. It’s not as if we are creating a fork. Because of MS’s refusal to take non-employee patches, Seo created fepy.sourceforge.net. That actually happened, it’s not a matter of conjecture.

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https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389508

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