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*boggle*
Yeah, sure, I've gotten used to the notion that Javascript is nowadays best treated as an object format, using the browser as its "hardware" -- enough so that I believe the next version of Querki's UI is going to be written in Scala and compiled to Javascript.
But the point has just been driven home to me by discovering that someone has (several years ago, in fact) compiled Linux to Javascript, along with an emulator of an x86 PC for it to run on, and built a complete virtual machine inside the browser. And I don't mean a little toy subset of Linux -- for giggles, I typed "emacs hello.c", and by god it booted freaking Emacs inside of my browser. It runs like mud, of course, but this is very much one of those "it's a wonder the bear dances at all" moments.
I think I need to re-evaluate my definition of the word "platform". If you can run a PC emulator, running an operating system, running a huge and complex program, all inside of a browser window, the game has definitely shifted...
Yeah, sure, I've gotten used to the notion that Javascript is nowadays best treated as an object format, using the browser as its "hardware" -- enough so that I believe the next version of Querki's UI is going to be written in Scala and compiled to Javascript.
But the point has just been driven home to me by discovering that someone has (several years ago, in fact) compiled Linux to Javascript, along with an emulator of an x86 PC for it to run on, and built a complete virtual machine inside the browser. And I don't mean a little toy subset of Linux -- for giggles, I typed "emacs hello.c", and by god it booted freaking Emacs inside of my browser. It runs like mud, of course, but this is very much one of those "it's a wonder the bear dances at all" moments.
I think I need to re-evaluate my definition of the word "platform". If you can run a PC emulator, running an operating system, running a huge and complex program, all inside of a browser window, the game has definitely shifted...