Now that JavaScript is getting so insanely fast, it's starting to look more and more interesting for purposes other than just doing a bit of dynamic HTML and AJAX on web sites. Things like the canvas tag for doing graphics help too.

Here's a few links of weird uses for JavaScript where its its new-found speed will come in handy:

• http://matt.west.co.tt/spectrum/jsspeccy/
• http://www.6502asm.com/ — and another!
• Amiga emulator
• Several ray tracers: one two three
• A raycaster which is a pseudo-3D engine, doing Wolfenstein.

JavaScript (or ECMAScript) is looking more and more interesting as a target for compiling code — it's a powerful, dynamic language, and you get a runtime which has several implementations both open-source and proprietary and is already installed on millions of computers and can be run right on a web page without requiring installation or anything complicated that would typically get in between an application and its users.

• The haXe language can target JavaScript
• HotRuby is an implementation of Ruby to run in JavaScript
• GWT allows writing server-side and client-side in Java, but the client-side part gets compiled to JavaScript
• ScriptSharp compiles C# code to JavaScript
• This article describes a system to compile C, through LLVM, to JavaScript!
• Pyjamas does something similar to GWT, but for Python.

Now if only there was a browser standard to allow JavaScript access to the audio hardware, we could do browser-based audio synthesis with it! I haven't seen any dicussion of this exact topic, though I imagine that in the meantime Flash 10 could be used for this purpose. (But I'd prefer something that doesn't depend on a plugin! Even if Flash is so widely deployed..)