Why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are not compiled languages and will they ever be?

Question

Why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are not becoming compiled languages (or maybe even merge into a single compiled language)? What if browsers were running \"Browser Virtual Machine\" and

Answer 1

The V8 javascript engine (also embedded in Google Chrome, but it's open-source and liberally licensed so you're welcome to use it in the next browser you write!) does compile Javascript to native machine code -- of course, it does it "just in time" (like most modern compilers -- Java, C#, etc!), not "ahead of time" (like Fortran did in 1954 when computers were just too weak to handle compilation in the midst of execution). I'd be surprised if other good JS engines, like those in the very latest Firefox and Safari, didn't do the same.

Looks like you're not advocating "javascript as a compiled language" (since it obviously already IS compiled, if you're using a good JS engine), but rather "ahead-of-time" compilation for it (just when most modern languages are essentially abandoning ahead-of-time compilation). Pushing machine code rather than compilable code down the wire sounds like a mostly horrible idea -- much larger size, difficulties in supporting one CPU vs another, security nightmares in properly sandboxing it, etc, etc) with not much in term of compensating benefits.

That said, if you're really keen on pushing machine code to the client, try out nativeclient (as long as the client is an x86 machine - forget every smart phone on the planet, many netbooks, good old macs, etc) -- at least it promises a fix to the security nightmares. If and when you're happy with nativeclient, transforming a just-in-time compiler into an ahead-of-time one is a far easier technical challenge (if you want to keep using Javascript for the sources rather than other languages, of course).