New opportunities for D => ASM.js

Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu May 15 23:21:39 PDT 2014


On Thursday, 15 May 2014 at 17:37:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 5/15/2014 3:51 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 14 May 2014 at 20:50:47 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>>
>>> For the story, mozilla dropped out of the NaCl project so they
>>> can pull out their me too solution. Now we are back to where 
>>> we
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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 ?
>
> Yea, exactly. I've never really complained much about asm.js 
> because, well, at least it's an improvement over JS (and isn't 
> just simply "another browser-forced language I'm expected to 
> learn, use, and enjoy" like Dart). But yea, the whole 
> "backwards compatible with regular JS" is a big load of shit, 
> and yet asm.js makes fundamental design compromises simply for 
> the sake of that fundamentally broken "feature".
>
>>>
>>> Sadly, because of mozilla moves with ASM.js, there is no 
>>> industry
>>> standard to run native things in the browser. Until things 
>>> settle
>>> down, these are cool, but useless technologies.
>>
>> That is what the desktop is for anyway.
>
> Yea, see that's the real root issue behind this whole "Browser 
> Wars 2.0" clusterfuck. A bunch of web-obsessed asshats keep 
> trying to shove every damn thing into a browser window. Shit, 
> they don't even fucking *know* why they do it, they just don't 
> question "web is the future", as if it'd be some kind of heresy.
>
> We could've had some damn good cross-platform 
> zero-install/sandboxed-ez-install infrastructures in place by 
> now (ie, the *only* legitimate motivations for webapps) if all 
> these clowns hadn't been wasting all their effort on this 
> idiotic pig-with-makeup house of cards that is "web 2.0".

Most of my UI programming at work is Web based, as that is what 
the customers ask for.

On my side projects, I always do native UIs and I am hoping that 
the native mobile apps, finally make the people understand that 
what matters is the network protocols, not the browser.

The ideas behind the browser are great, when looked from the 
Xerox PARC hypermedia research, the implementation however leaves 
a lot to be desired.

The problem is that currently it is a document format, trying to 
be an application, with a clustf**** of JavaScript/CSS/HTML with 
more compatibility issues than when C was being standardized.

--
Paulo


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list