Microsoft ECS talk.

Was quite well-received; went 15 minutes overtime, but people seems to not mind at all. The PDF slides and Flash slides are available.

Going to sleep for a bit, then resuming 6.2.12 release engineering, then go hack at .Net MSIL<->Pugs PIL tomorrow with Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman from the VB team. That should be fun. :-)

Comments

[grumpY!]

interesting as usual.

questions: p. 157 - what does it mean for parrot to point to firefox? javascript emitting?

there seems to be a lot of javascript fetishization lately. i'm not entirely sure i am sold on building complex systems in the web stack with js. http is not a low latency protocol. there is no useful threading support. i'm of a mind these days to just accept it for what it is, a small tool for handling events.

javascript2 should be interesting but i am unsure if it will ever see mass-adoption, even though it appears to provide support for js1 deployment too. as far as i know, ie7 does not move the javascript runtime at all from ie6...it literally looks like javascript2 is a 2012 technology, thats as if microsoft accepts the mozilla-born spec at all. by that time, i predict that a highly graphical and massively threaded environment that looks and acts like secondlife will have relegated the web stack to the same low-interest tier now occupied by nntp and its ilk. of course none of this precludes playing with it.

[Audrey T]

grumpY: The pointer means that Firefox may embed Parrot at some point -- especially if any one of the dynamic languages Really Works on it.

I agree that JS1 is a horribly limited target language. If JS2 doesn't fix it, somebody else will. But somehow I think the Mozilla people -- again infiltrated by lambdaheads -- is on the right track.

[grumpY!]

if firefox embedded parrot MY HEAD WOULD EXPLODE (thats a good thing). i have been pushing for a true open VM at the events layer in firefox for a while now, not sure if i have ranted on here about this before or not. while even a JVM or mono runtime would "work", my preference of course would be parrot (once it is mature). anything to give developers the freedom to unshackle themselves from javascript. i should be able to code my events support in perl (or another supported language). users of my site should not have to care, as long as the vm supports the browser security model.

thanks for the reply!