Then LLVM is as viable an option as JVM and CLI. Even better, it's open-source and not committee or corporation-driven. And from the political point of view, once LLVM finds its way into Safari (very good chance) then Firefox and/or Chrome, consider the problem solved. I think this idea is brewing somewhere right now, it's too obvious.
LLVM is not an alternative to JVM/CLI in any interesting way. It's too low-level. It doesn't provide memory management, introspection, loading, etc. It's just a compilation target really. LLVM has no dynamic features either.
Yeah.. no. Another commenter already pointed out the issues with llvm being too low-level.. regarding the cli and "open source"... mono is open source in every sense of the word (lib and runtime are mit.. c# compiler is lgpl).. the runtime spec is committee driven, true.. but so is the javascript language.
As for apples investment in llvm: and? Your speculation that it could be used in safari, presumably for squirrelfish, is about as unfounded as the assertion that ecma is plotting a coup by switching from is to ecma.. if you have links to the contrary, ill be happy to eat my hat, not to mention learn how llvm is useful in this space.
also, to understand just how much fun llvm can be, take a look at unladen swallow.. there are major RAM and binary size bloat issues without the corresponding speed increases, currently. Maybe it'll get better, I don't know.
Anyhow.. if the cli were a browser standard then MS could use .net in ie and everyone else could use mono .. wouldn't be perfect ill allow.. but its better than a bunch of incompatible, dialling javascript VMs. Perhaps.
Will never happen of course, but one can always dream.
LLVM may be a bit immature at this stage, true. Then let's look at CLI/C#.
We don't know what patents are there kept in Microsoft's backyards. For one thing, Microsoft is not interested in supporting any technology or product other than theirs, and we know they will do everything to promote IE and kill competition at any cost. Just imagine for a moment Microsoft caring about how smoothly C# runs in Firefox on Linux. As French say, "impossible".
I don't trust them. And Mono is a Trojan Horse, thankfully not as popular and robust as it could (should?) be in principle.
Note that I don't mind the technology itself. C# is neat ("not my style" though), CLI is pretty fast, and they both play nicely with Windows. C# applications in general are smoother and faster than Java-based ones. Love the results. It's just that any port to other OSes will look worse than on Windows, with or without Microsoft's participation.
You're either a troll, or you don't understand what we're talking about. But just to keep things correct:
LLVM is not immature - it simply has a completely different goal than JRE, or .NET.
Noone suggests C# in this comment thread - just the runtime environment for the IL bytecode. MS wouldn't have to support it, because IL is an open standard, which anyone can implement. I wouldn't expect MS to get involved in that project at all. GNU project has a gcc-cil implementation - if CIL is clean enough for people at FSF, I'm not sure what problems do you see...
"not as robust as it could be in principle" has no actual information in it. Try listing specific features and reality and not general terms which can be always true and false depending on your point of view.
In "will look worse than on Windows" I assume you're talking about the GUI. In-browser virtual machine for running javascript does not require any interaction with GUI apart from that exposed by the browser. It cannot look different than any other implementation, because there is no display code there.
> LLVM is not immature - it simply has a completely different goal than JRE, or .NET.
But it's a virtual machine too, among other things.
> Noone suggests C# in this comment thread
It is suggested in the post as one of the possibilities: We could replace `csharp' with any of the existing open sourced compilers (C#, IronPython, IronRuby and others). Obviously, if we are looking at the possibility of integrating CLI into browsers, C# would be one of the main languages just like with JVM it would be Java, for many reasons.
Re: "will look worse than on Windows" -- I meant in all respects, not just the looks but also performance.
