Syntactic Sugar v3.2

Those last days, there has been a lot of fuss all around about Orto¹ and HotRuby. I've also heard of a project of OCaml bytecode interpreter in JS, though I have no link for it at this time. Having some Java/Ruby/OCaml bytecode interpreted in JavaScript is quite nice, but I just can't see what's new/interesting about that.

There are quite a few other languages for which a JS interpreter is available: Basic, Scheme, Lisp, Prolog. Even Javascript can be interpreted in JS using Narcissus². If this is not enough for you, I can add Brainfuck or even other esoteric languages.

I guess you'll say that all of those bring nothing interesting to the browser and that using compiled bytecode instead of parsing/interpreting source code is much faster. The latter can be easily forgotten, what about an x86 interpreter³ ?

Nevertheless, what is the easiest thing to write ?

• plain JavaScript, with a powerful library such as JQuery
• some bloated Java using cluttered GUI tools which were not built to output web components

A few years ago, writing some JavaScript meant dealing with cross browser issues. Today, JS is much more friendly, thanks to a lot of libraries. Moreover, I'm pretty sure the next move will be SSJS⁴, is there a reason (other than because I can) for porting Java/Ruby to JS ?

1. John Resig talks about it here [↩]
2. It's disturbing, I know [↩]
3. Some guys really have a lot of free time.. [↩]
4. I'll write an article about that someday [↩]