The new age of JavaScript
Many of us will remember remember the US Government vs Microsoft Antitrust case of the late 90's earl 00's, where Microsoft essentially claimed that Windows "is slowed down" when Internet Explorer was removed from the system.
This of course was proved to be rubbish.
I was reminded of this recently when reading about Intel's attempt to get on the JavaScript train (River Trail). Intel has a browser extension that allows web developers to take full advantage of their parallel hardware, by providing appropriate progarmming models. It does this by extending JavaScript with simple deterministic data-parallel constructs that are translated at runtime into a low-level hardware abstraction layer. "The Parallel JavaScript" extension is available in Firefox Nightly builds and claims significant speedup over sequential JavaScript.
Jump on the train, or risk getting left behind!
Once purely the domain of web browsers, increasing use of Javascript outside web pages - for example server-side network programming, desktop and mobile apps and even game development is making JavaScript the language of the future.
Ironically, it is the Internet Explorer browser itself that has traditionally held back Microsoft in the browser wars. With the latest versions being massive improvements on the old, the next challenge will be to get hardware vendors to write extensions for IE to maximise the possibilities. Will they get left behind again? Only the future will tell.
