No Stupid Questions (Developer Edition)

896 readers

1 users here now

This is a place where you can ask any programming / topic related to the instance questions you want!

For a more general version of this concept check out !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Icon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

LinearArray@programming.dev

How feasible is a browser that uses something like Lua, Python or Ruby as its scripting language instead of JS? Also, how stupid is this idea (ignoring any "incompatibility with JS pages" situations)? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by ICastFist@programming.dev to c/no_stupid_questions@programming.dev

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Or, put it another way, a html renderer that can open most web pages, but has a different programming/scripting language that it can interpret during runtime or on page loads, instead of the javascript engine.

I suppose that java applets, flash and activeX were attempts in these directions, but they were things you had to install on top of the browsers, so not quite the same thing? I'm imagining something like web pages using Lua, since it's lightweight, to make them dynamic.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] brian@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want lightweight it's probably better to stick with js or some language that compiles directly to wasm.

That's being said, there are libraries for running python/lua/ruby in a browser and interacting with the dom. I've only personally used python, which is great for running scientific computation things in browser since python has such an ecosystem for that type of thing. It is a pretty big addition to bundle size initially iirc, so I'm not sure how useful it is as a general purpose replacement for js.

Python Lua Ruby

[–] snowe@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Opal also compiles Ruby to JavaScript https://opalrb.com/