I'm one of the two people who wrote the article in question. Thanks for this response. This is much closer to what we were trying to express than the impression that many people (including Nutter) seem to have gotten out of it. It's reassuring that at least some readers were able to make sense of the general points we wanted to convey.
> The position of Dart guys is simple: by compiling an arbitrary language (Dart in this case) to x86 (or whatever native arch the browser is running on) they can get a much faster code than compiling to an abstract VM, like JVM or .NET or parrot.
Not just that, but that's is much simpler and easier to do so. It may be possible to get just as fast with a public intermediate bytecode format, but the amount of work required would be much much greater. Given how much effort it already takes to create a new language and all of the surrounding infrastructure (we're designing the language, iterating on it, writing a spec, building a VM, writing compilers, filling out the core library, writing tools, editors, documenting, evangelizing, etc.), anything we can do to minimize effort is a good idea.
> The position of Dart guys is simple: by compiling an arbitrary language (Dart in this case) to x86 (or whatever native arch the browser is running on) they can get a much faster code than compiling to an abstract VM, like JVM or .NET or parrot.
Not just that, but that's is much simpler and easier to do so. It may be possible to get just as fast with a public intermediate bytecode format, but the amount of work required would be much much greater. Given how much effort it already takes to create a new language and all of the surrounding infrastructure (we're designing the language, iterating on it, writing a spec, building a VM, writing compilers, filling out the core library, writing tools, editors, documenting, evangelizing, etc.), anything we can do to minimize effort is a good idea.