Why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are not compiled languages and will they ever be?
Why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are not becoming compiled languages (or maybe even merge into a single compiled language)? What if browsers were running "Browser Virtual Machine" and html/javascript/css sources could by compiled to a "browser bytecode". Wouldn't it help developers and users a lot?
I can see a few challenges:
What to do with zillions of existing pages? Make this compilation optional, so if you want you can use plain old html. If you want to feed a browser with a compiled page just use .chtml for example.
How search providers would index pages? Make a decompiler that would decompile bytecode into exact original sources (for example like flash can be decompiled). Or search providers can use the same virtual machine and get data they need from there.
How to make it compatible with all browsers? Have one centralized developer (lets say w3c) to develop this virtual machine and then each browser would embed it.
But what about benefits:
- Speed.
- Size.
- No more "loose" and "half-correct" html. It is either correct or won't compile.
- Looks the same in every (supported) browser.
If not a bytecode then at least have some native compression going on, html probably is not the most efficient way of data storing. I know there is gzip but why to compress pages every time on a server and decompress in a browser if we can compress it once and feed it to a browser?
So what stops us from taking this road (well, besides a huge amount of effort to make it all happen)?
Answer
Ah, but Javascript IS becoming a compiled language. Check out Firefox 3.5 with TraceMonkey. It's insanely fast compared to um you-know-who's browser. It's true that JS will never be C, but it's a much more dynamic language than C is, and in many ways that makes it more expressive and powerful.
As far as HTML goes, I don't think that the lack of validity of HTML is a huge detriment to speed. I think the engines that put together the visual representation and manipulate the DOM need to get a lot better (um, IE, I'm looking in your general direction...). CSS compliance needs to get better, and CSS itself needs to get more powerful. (Get on the bus with CSS 3 people!)
But I do think that speed is going to get better on Firefox and Chrome to such an extent that people really ARE going to start using it for mainstream application development. It's funny. Adobe seems to be selling Flash as their platform for dynamic web content, MSFT is selling Silverlight for dynamic web content, and Google just wants to really improve HTML and Javascript to display dynamic web content. And Google's doing pretty well at it so far, I must say...