Category Archives: JavaScript

JavaScript, Programming Languages

Doppio Selected as SIGPLAN Research Highlight

Doppio, our work on making it possible to run general-purpose applications inside the browser, recently won two awards. At PLDI, it received the Distinguished Artifact Award. SIGPLAN, the Special Interest Group of ACM that focuses on Programming Languages, just selected Doppio as a Research Highlight. These papers are chosen by a board from across the PL community; SIGPLAN highlights are also recommended for consideration for the CACM Research Highlights section.

Below is the citation. IMHO John did an extraordinary job on the paper and the system, and I am glad to see that the community agrees!

Title: Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier
Authors: John Vilk, Emery Berger, University of Massachusetts
Venue: PLDI 2014

The authors build a JavaScript-based framework, Doppio, in which unmodified programs can be executed within a web browser. They do this by creating a runtime environment in JavaScript that supports basic services such as sockets, threading, and a filesystem that are not otherwise supported within the browser. The authors demonstrate the framework by implementing an in-browser JVM and an in-browser runtime for C++. The paper is an engineering tour de force. The paper should appeal to a wide audience because of the ubiquity of the browser (and thus the utility of their systems), and because it is broad in scope.

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Java, JavaScript, Programming Languages

Doppio (JVM in JavaScript) @ Strange Loop.

Screen Shot 2012-12-07 at 2.35.51 PMStrange Loop will be featuring a talk on Doppio, the JVM in Javascript (course project for my grad class gone wild).

https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/doppio-building-a-jvm-in-the-browser

Doppio: Building a JVM in the Browser

Modern browsers provide sandboxed versions of many native system interfaces, such as graphics rendering and a filesystem. Thus in theory we should be able to replicate most of the desktop experience on the web — except for the fact that a great deal of applications are not written in Javascript. Enabling the browser to run other languages would add whole classes of applications to the web platform.

Doppio is an effort to bring the JVM languages to the web by implementing a JVM in Coffeescript. While the JVM specification is technically language-agnostic, the original JVM is written in C and C++, and its architecture reflects that. We’ll discuss some of the challenges of implementing the spec and porting the libraries to a high-level, non-systems language, particularly when it does not expose threads directly. We’ll also talk about how NodeJS was invaluable for development.