New opportunities for D => ASM.js

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 19:28:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 02:52:43PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> But then using it as a GUI engine and software platform is like
>> abusing Latex or PDF to make software run inside Acrobat 
>> Viewer. All
>> the effort, bloat and compromises...and for what point?
>
> No software is feature-complete until it can read email. :-)
>
> Today I skimmed over the PDF spec... and was horrified to 
> discover that
> I had been living in a fool's paradise, thinking that it was 
> only a
> passive *document* format. Turns out that it is yet another of 
> those
> document format turned Turing-complete messes. With its own 
> embedded
> flavor of Javascript, even. (And obviously, it's gratuitously
> incompatible with "standard" JS). With the ability to attach 
> files.
> (Huh, what?! I thought PDF was *the* attachment... nope, not 
> only it can
> contain executable JS code, which is just a repetition of that 
> security
> nightmare that is Outlook + ActiveX, it can also encapsulate an 
> entire
> directory structure within itself. Yep. No bloatware here, move 
> along.)
> PDFs can also embed *movies*. (!!!)
>
> So basically, you can create an entire interactive website 
> inside a
> single PDF file, complete with scripting, movies, embedded 
> subfiles
> (basically a self-contained directory structure aka URL tree). 
> It would
> utterly suck, of course, given that probably only crappy Adobe 
> bloatware
> would be able to interpret the resulting mess. But you could do 
> it. And
> obviously somebody *has* done it, since otherwise where did all 
> these
> features come from? One of these days, somebody's gonna 
> reinvent the
> browser inside a PDF file...
Heh, this recently came up in a good article about how broken 
software security is:

https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1#493c-7acd71bf4c69