D => asm.js for the web?

[Kirill]

back to the original, will d compile to asm.js?




On Saturday, 23 March 2013 at 02:20:33 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Maybe you remember the NaCl or PNaCl plug-in from Google, that 
> allows to safely run code at near native speed on the browser 
> (only 10-30% speed loss, in a probably safe sandbox). This 
> plug-in seems interesting, but so far I think it's not getting 
> a lot of traction, and it seems Mozilla is not interested in it.
>
> Now on Reddit they have linked "asm.js". It's an easy to 
> compile subset of JavaScript, that contains type annotations 
> (inside comments, so it's still valid standard JavaScript). 
> Mozilla has created a modified version of its JIT that 
> recognizes asm.js code and compiles it ahead of time to give, 
> they say, about half the speed of native code (if it's not 
> recognized, it's seen as normal JS). Even if this speed will 
> increase a little with time, I think it will keep being a 
> little slower than NaCl code, but maybe for lot of people the 
> speed of asm.js will be enough (and the safety of NaCl is not 
> so certain).
>
> A modified version of Emscripten (a LLVM bytecode to JavaScript 
> compiler) outputs asm.js. So if you have C/C++ code, with 
> Emscripten and some parts of LLVM you compile it to asm.js, and 
> then Firefox Nightly recognizes it (there is an annotation).
>
> So given the LDC2 project, maybe with LDC+Emscripten+asm.js 
> there is a chance to see D on the web. I think someone will be 
> happy to use D instead of C/C++ on the web for 
> performance-sensitive code, like games. This is a small window 
> of opportunity for D.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile