D could catch this wave: web assembly

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 19:39:58 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Great, so it'll have the same fundamental problem as asm.js: 
> Claims to be backwards compatible, but really isn't because the 
> backwards fallback method is likely to be prohibitively slow 
> and will especially fuck mobile browsers that use the fallback.

Yeah. This fallback thing does not make much sense. They say 
WebAssembly will reduce the file size by 7% after compression 
compared to asm.js . Who cares?

In my experience performance issues usually are in the 
layout/render engine, or something related to it.

> Maybe this suggestion demonstrates ignorance, but I'm thinking 
> "They should just use LLVM IR. It already exists." Maybe toss 
> in some LLVM IR extensions as needed, and boom, done.

The LLVM IR isn't stable, so you need a higher level IR. And 
that's hard to design. So maybe 5 years before they get it right, 
and _properly_ implemented, in all browsers?

Of course, in 5 years hardware has changed and regular Javascript 
JITs have improved, so by then we need WebAssembly2… So, 8 years?