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Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

#3

Post by nothrabannosir »

dicroce wrote: post #2

Come on Google! Support asm.js in Chrome.... Give up on Native Client.... Even Microsoft is doing Asm.js now....

Why? Last I heard, Chrome is going long on their JIT and trying to get it to automatically squeeze the same performance out of asm.js code as the others, without special shortcuts. These "real" optimizations can then seamlessly be applied outside of asm.js code.

Isn't that something that benefits us all? I'm happy they're trying, at least.

Re: Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

#6

Post by acdha »

teacup50 wrote: post #5
dicroce wrote: post #2

Come on Google! Support asm.js in Chrome.... Give up on Native Client.... Even Microsoft is doing Asm.js now....

Why? asm.js is a hack relative to NaCL.

There's no need to be disparaging – NaCL is more ambitious but asm.js has a backwards compatibility path. Both are valid engineering decisions, particularly since it's really easy to imagine a world where if NaCL delivers some major benefits the same toolchain could generate both for a seamless upgrade.

Re: Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

#8

Post by bmurphy1976 »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #3
dicroce wrote: post #2

Come on Google! Support asm.js in Chrome.... Give up on Native Client.... Even Microsoft is doing Asm.js now....

Why? Last I heard, Chrome is going long on their JIT and trying to get it to automatically squeeze the same performance out of asm.js code as the others, without special shortcuts. These "real" optimizations can then seamlessly be applied outside of asm.js code. Isn't that something that benefits us all? I'm happy they're trying, at least.

That's cool that they are trying, but what's the opportunity cost of not doing it? How much effort would it be to simply optimize asm.js now and then undo the optimization later when the core JIT gets smarter?

Seems to me THAT is the way to go, but this is not my area of expertise.

Re: Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

#9

Post by jlongster »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #3
dicroce wrote: post #2

Come on Google! Support asm.js in Chrome.... Give up on Native Client.... Even Microsoft is doing Asm.js now....

Why? Last I heard, Chrome is going long on their JIT and trying to get it to automatically squeeze the same performance out of asm.js code as the others, without special shortcuts. These "real" optimizations can then seamlessly be applied outside of asm.js code. Isn't that something that benefits us all? I'm happy they're trying, at least.

While you are correct that the actual runtime speed in theory should be able to be achieved with the JIT, there are other advantages to officially supporting asm.js. One of the main things is ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation which compiles the asm.js code directly to assembly immediately after it's parsed. This gives you predictability (you literally get warnings in the console if it couldn't compile), which is really big for comprehending performance.

Re: Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

#10

Post by WorldWideWayne »

dicroce wrote: post #2

Come on Google! Support asm.js in Chrome.... Give up on Native Client.... Even Microsoft is doing Asm.js now....

I want less things emulated via Javascript and more stuff done directly via native code. Everything that is built on top of HTML/JS/CSS is basically a hack that is trying to emulate much better native platforms and it sucks. Why advocate to stay there? Let's go in the other direction in my opinion.
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