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by skatepark 4871 days ago
For a desktop and/or mobile app, on which the consumer is waiting and you are burning battery (laptop/phone) or just simply CPU cycles, 2x-4x slower is 'not fast'. You're simply wasting the end-users time and resources for what amounts to ideological reasoning.

We're always making a trade-off between performance and ease of programming, but when your competition is coming in at 2x faster than your optimal case, and 4x in the standard case, you're going to lose for all but the simplest apps.

1 comments

How does PNaCl compare in terms of performance to "native" code? It still has the compilation overhead, it still has a lot of the bounds checking… It's not clear to me that PNaCl will actually be much quicker than asm.js.
I believe the ideal (for users) would be to target NaCL natively, with a fallback to server-side PNaCL compilation, and an absolute fallback to PNaCL compilation/execution.