Experiments with emscripten and D

[John Colvin]

On Saturday, 17 August 2013 at 21:16:59 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> On Saturday, 17 August 2013 at 20:58:09 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> On Saturday, 17 August 2013 at 20:42:33 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>> And you'd have to sandbox the code since arbitrary D code 
>>> running wild
>>> on the user's computer is a Bad Thing(tm). Which runs into 
>>> GC-related
>>> issues when your client is a low-memory handheld device. 
>>> Though arguably
>>> this would still be an improvement over JS, since an 
>>> interpreted
>>> language necessarily uses more resources.
>>
>> You are getting pretty close to NaCl idea :)
>
> Yeah, I was thinking that :p
>
> NaCl seems designed mostly as native extensions for the 
> html/js/css world.
>
> I was thinking bigger: The browser as a (transient, if 
> appropriate) application delivery system.
>
> I really dislike html and css for anything other than simple 
> documents, it quickly feels like one big patchily supported 
> corner-case. Anything other than simple uses ends up requiring 
> significant abuses, even if you're lucky enough to be working 
> in a hypothetical totally standards compliant environment. Even 
> something as simple as a drop-down menu with persistence means 
> either: massively abuse css OR use JS.
>
> What I'm imagining is a truly dynamic web-delivered UI with 
> native speed and processing capability, not just a faster 
> web-app.

This would still be working - to some extent, in the browser:
the end user experience can be as seamless or as seperated as the 
developer wants. Your D app could look just like a webpage and 
behave just like a webpage, or it could be a totally separate 
window that appears to have no relation to the web as we know it.

For an increasing number of users these days, the browser *is* 
the computer. They barely touch anything else. Nobody wants to 
install another program to do every little task, but they'll 
happily click a link to a specialised web-app. Native apps took 
off on mobile, but at the same time they were dying on the 
desktop. Now the view seems to be to want to kill them on mobile 
too and make everything a web-app. Perhaps we can get the best of 
both worlds.

What I want is a true way out from the current obsession with 
trying to shoe-horn every possible use-case in to html/css/js 
with the associated necessary over-reliance on js, which is by 
all accounts a horrible language.