Ask HN: Can JavaScript be treated like machine language?

1 pointsmmanulis8y ago8 comments

I'm wondering if it's possible to treat JS as if it's a CPU instruction set and then building a compiler back-end for Clang or GCC for it.

Even if it's not possible for Clang or GCC, any reason(s) why JS cannot be treated as a machine language, potentially using a subset of it in the beginning.

I imagine the "model" would be centered around DOM manipulation and AJAX facilities.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to ask this, if people have relevant links to share, would love to see them.

Ask HN: Can JavaScript be treated like machine language?

1 pointsmmanulis8y ago8 comments

I'm wondering if it's possible to treat JS as if it's a CPU instruction set and then building a compiler back-end for Clang or GCC for it.

Even if it's not possible for Clang or GCC, any reason(s) why JS cannot be treated as a machine language, potentially using a subset of it in the beginning.

I imagine the "model" would be centered around DOM manipulation and AJAX facilities.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to ask this, if people have relevant links to share, would love to see them.

8 comments

6 comments · 2 top-level

acemarke8y ago· 2 in thread

Uh... does this list of "languages that compile to Javascript" count? :) https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...

More specifically, Emscripten seems to be exactly what you're describing: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten

mmanulisOP8y ago

These are more like transpiling, right? That is, there is a direct translation from <language> into JS?

I was thinking more along the lines of how a compiler works, translating into some kind of AST and then converting into JS from the AST.

acemarke8y ago

"Transpiling" _is_ compiling. The term is just used to refer to output that is another high-level language, rather than some kind of assembly or bytecode.

While I haven't looked at the implementations of any of those compilers, I would assume that most of them do actually parse their source language into an appropriate AST, and write out JS based on that AST.

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flavio818y ago· 2 in thread

See asm.js. This is exactly what you propose.

BTW, asm.js has been superseded by Webassembly which ditches Javascript completely.

mmanulisOP8y ago

As I understand Webassembly, it's meant to replace JS completely as a native implementation in a browser. That is, it's meant to replace the JS interpreter.

Not sure if I understood it correctly though.

flavio818y ago

Not exactly.

The browser, instead of downloading javascript, downloads WASM bytecode, and this bytecode gets compiled ahead-of-time to machine language and ran by the browser.

The bytecode itself is the product of compiling a source code written in the language of your choice, for example Java or something more advanced like INTERCAL.

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