Saying goodbye to asm.js • Hacker News Board

Re: Saying goodbye to asm.js

#161

Post by crabbone » Thu, May 21, 2026, 8:27 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #27

> asm.js was Mozilla’s response to the question posed by NaCl and PNaCl: how can the web run code at native speeds? Had it been today, Chrome would have just pushed NaCl and PNaCl no matter what, and then everyone would complain why Safari and Firefox aren't keeping up with "Web" standards.

While NaCL and Silverlight were both alternatives to Flash...

All these people in comments beating their chests about how WebAssembly is totally good for everything you can imagine, and there's not a single browser game that is not a tic-tac-toe level.

Re: Saying goodbye to asm.js

#162

Post by spartanatreyu » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

burntcaramel wrote: post #159

spartanatreyu wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sudoku example has something massively wrong with it's performance. Latency is over a second per click and it halts after a few clicks. The QR example works fine though

Thanks, I had shipped a bug in the event system. The performance should be much improved now.

Can confirm it's working now :)

Re: Saying goodbye to asm.js

#163

Post by musicale » Fri, May 22, 2026, 3:57 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #27

> asm.js was Mozilla’s response to the question posed by NaCl and PNaCl: how can the web run code at native speeds? Had it been today, Chrome would have just pushed NaCl and PNaCl no matter what, and then everyone would complain why Safari and Firefox aren't keeping up with "Web" standards.

I like how NaCl cleverly used x86 segmentation. ;-/

Re: Saying goodbye to asm.js

#164

Post by nextaccountic » Sun, May 24, 2026, 3:12 AM UTC

avadodin wrote: post #151

nextaccountic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk more? I've seen people say only good things about wasm

Not op, but I only know it as the 32-bit single-threaded binary replacement for JavaScript that can't interact with anything naturally yet people get all excited about when they manage to turn their LLVM slop output into it. Maybe we've been reading different HN submissions.

That was only the MVP.

Wasm nowadays is 64 bits (except for Safari, the IE6 of our time) and has threads.

True about the wasm inability to call JS APIs with no overhead. This sucks