New opportunities for D => ASM.js

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 14 May 2014 at 20:50:47 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> were 10 years ago with the browser war. We could have one 
> unified
> standard int he name of NaCl, but fuck that, now we have too.

Not as long as Apple and Microsoft don't want to fuel Chrome Book 
as a competing platform. I would be surprised if they would 
implement PNaCl before there is significant demand in the general 
population.

> ASM.js is inferior in every possible way (slower, bigger source,
> more overhead, you name it) to NaCl except one: ASM.js run in a
> standard JS interpreter. Except that if you are using this, it 
> is because you need the speed in the first place. To take the
> example of video game, can you claim that the game works when 
> you run it at 0.5fps ?

Actually you don't really need that much speed for getting good 
framerates if the gameworld is somewhat static. Apple and 
Microsoft have their own optimizing engines that probably can use 
the constraints in asm.js to generate better code with little 
effort. (They are already tinkering with applying types to 
dynamic variables.)

> Until things settle down, these are cool, but useless 
> technologies.

Not if your framework (like Unity) can compile down to multiple 
formats.