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Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

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Re: Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

#11

Compiling to Javascript is nothing short of a mental illness. The perversions that the terrible design of the web has driven people to are simply breathtaking...

Actually, it makes a lot of sense to me, and you can take advantage of C++'s more efficient abstraction models.

Re: Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

#12
post #8

OT but I really hate how these sorts of slide decks break the back button. emscripten is pretty cool technology, the paper presenting the tech ( http://davideglintine-new.googlecode.com/hg/docs/paper.pdf ) is actually a really easy read. Cool stuff. I hope it doesn't become a norm to try and write "normal" websites in C++, though things like games do seem to be easier

How does it break the back button? Back button works as I would expect it to.

Re: Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

#13

Compiling to Javascript is nothing short of a mental illness. The perversions that the terrible design of the web has driven people to are simply breathtaking...

Maintaining a massive cross-OS cross-processor code-base is nothing short of mental illness.

Re: Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

#15

Compiling to Javascript is nothing short of a mental illness. The perversions that the terrible design of the web has driven people to are simply breathtaking...

Compiling to asm.js isn't the same thing as compiling to JS. asm.js is just a funny-serialized bytecode. Someday they can trade it out for a sane serialization and hardly anything will blink.

Re: Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

#18
post #15

Compiling to Javascript is nothing short of a mental illness. The perversions that the terrible design of the web has driven people to are simply breathtaking...

Compiling to asm.js isn't the same thing as compiling to JS. asm.js is just a funny-serialized bytecode. Someday they can trade it out for a sane serialization and hardly anything will blink.

Worst case, I expect individual compilers will develop their own bytecode serialization format that generates asm.js on the client. There are various reasons to do it already (compression, debug vs release readability/minification concerns, etc) and future revisions of asm.js (like v2, which introduces Java/C#-oriented heap structures) will make it worthwhile.

Compiler -> Bytecode -> Normal JS/ASM.js is the long term strategy for asm support in JSIL, since it will depend on currently-experimental asm features and using asm+polyfills on all browsers would have obscenely bad performance characteristics.

Re: Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web

#19

Compiling to Javascript is nothing short of a mental illness. The perversions that the terrible design of the web has driven people to are simply breathtaking...

Nobody would compile to JavaScript if there was an analogous platform on the Web. There isn't one.
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