this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions (Developer Edition)

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How feasible is a browser that uses something like Lua, Python or Ruby as its scripting language instead of JS? Also, how stupid is this idea (ignoring any "incompatibility with JS pages" situations)? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by ICastFist@programming.dev to c/no_stupid_questions@programming.dev
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Or, put it another way, a html renderer that can open most web pages, but has a different programming/scripting language that it can interpret during runtime or on page loads, instead of the javascript engine.

I suppose that java applets, flash and activeX were attempts in these directions, but they were things you had to install on top of the browsers, so not quite the same thing? I'm imagining something like web pages using Lua, since it's lightweight, to make them dynamic.

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[โ€“] o11c@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's no point in replacing JS with another dynamically-typed language. JS has received a lot of attempts at depessimization. If you're going to replace it, it would have to be a language with real types (but reflection is still viable as a strictly-superior alternative to dynamic types)

[โ€“] nous@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

I would just replace it with a compile target - aka WASM. Then the web is not tied to one language but many can be built on top of it. WASM does need to more features then what is currently available to fully replace JS. DOM access for one, and probably a GC to reduce the amount of runtime you would need to ship (at least for languages that use a GC).