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Mozilla is working on Rust https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/Language-FAQ. Google has Go http://golang.org/.

To run compiled binaries from such languages you'll use Native Client http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ and Pepper APIs which let you access HTML5.

Go gets rid of some insecure low level things like pointers, keeps such things in an unsafe package to discourage its use. They intend to make it seamlessly compatible with NaCl. C/C++ code needs to be modified to work there.

JS is already not suitable for lots of stuff. Vendors are stretching its capabilities with big teams of fancy programmers implementing fancy VMs with big chunks written in assembler. At Google I/O they mentioned V8 is about as fast as it will get. Then bigger teams are writing massive APIs because even with fast VMs the language isn't fast enough to roll your own CSS/XAML/MXML/HTML parsers or 2D rendering contexts. So you're forced to wait or hack together things like LESS, CoffeeScript, Stylus in an attempt to communicate with the overlords.

With the browsers becoming the operating system for many users, you need a runtime that's as powerful as a regular operating system. Google and Mozilla are major players and it's nice to see them exploring alternatives.

But even if NaCl/Go is superior technologically, it may not overcome JavaScript's business and political momentum. As usual, technology is not chosen based on technological merit, but business considerations like legacy, lock in, etc. Perhaps NaCl/Go approach will succeed but it will be too little too late. Kinda feels that way with Flash and Browsers, they're finally serious platforms but might be too far behind Objective-C, C# and Java on mobiles.



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