You seem to be assuming that being an HTTP server implies having security holes.

It doesn't matter think what he thinks it means (or what you think it means, for that matter), it matters that Stephenson most likely used it for its alliterative qualities. The text betrays Stephenson's terminological intents quite conclusively.

What, are you saying that Italians have extensive pizza know-how? Impossibile!

In China, they already have their own class of the ultra-rich. I imagine that can't be of great help when it comes to social stabilization.

In some areas, they're rapidly approaching the 1950s, though. Give it a few years and they'll have their president assassinated just before they land on the Moon.

But if those types are not final, you don't know the dynamic subtype of concrete values (and the concrete methods to call) in advance, and you're forced to do the same kinds of optimizations that Javascript does. Seriously, look at current VM tech again. Type feedback and speculative inlining are of legal drinking age in the US by now.

By using all the usual methods, which are identical to those that Java VMs use? It's the identical problem.

And lack of constipation causes global warming. We're screwed either way, it seems.

"The west" started Chinese air pollution? So the smog around Chinese cities is our fault? They must be really desperate for excuses...

Well, it's a Completely Open Computer Kernel.

Of course, how else would you suggest to build a high-performing implementation of JS? These days, just about everyone is using either the Self-93 implementation model or something suspiciously similar. (BTW, technically, *all* Javascript functions are anonymous functions, it's just that some of them happen to be bound to global variable names, very much like in Scheme. Optimizing the calls of anonymous JS functions is no different from optimizing calls to any other JS functions.)

Unless they get inlined, type-specialized, yada yada yada...

Very respectfully.

Both get executed wherever you run them. Most web sites today don't have the bargaining power to convince users to run client-site java, though, even though many of them run it server-side.

As I mentioned below, you might be interested in this (at least cherry-pick-some-ideas-wise).