| > It's a blob transpiled from C, not exactly how people imagined the Web working a few years ago. It's not readable, nicely-formatted JS, sure, but neither is the optimised, minified JS most sites served. It is, however, valid JavaScript. It uses open standards (ECMAScript, the various web APIs). It's already supported by all browsers. > It's a non-W3C/TC39 approved set of compiler intrinsics/pragmas that switches on special behavior in one particular environment. It's not "special behaviour". It's a performance optimisation. It still behaves exactly like JavaScript. > If asmjs takes off and everyone starts writing Web apps by transpiling C code, Mozilla will have forced a sea change in the Web, forcing all other vendors into ahead-of-time compilation to compete, and forcing JS VMs to optimize for this particular kind of code. I don't see why people would write Web apps by transpiling C code, the main advantage is for the existing codebases written in C. And other vendors don't necessarily need to implement asm.js with AOT compilation. asm.js-conformant code works well very with JIT compilers. > Now, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I'm not arguing it isn't, but I think arguing "it's just JS, the syntax is the same, therefore it's open!" is somewhat disingenuous. ASMJS, if super successful, would create an implicit implementation spec for everyone. It will have in essence, created a language with identical syntax to Javascript, but with completely different expected execution semantics. No, it has identical execution semantics. It uses a static subset of JS, yes, but it's still JavaScript. If I remove the "use asm" pragma, the code still does exactly the same thing. > Why? Because developers would come to depend on ahead-of-time compilation, depend on apps that basically use emulated malloc'ed heaps, etc. Is that bad? Bear in mind that, without asm.js existing, this was the case anyway. asm.js wasn't created so that people could compile native code to run in the browser. It was created because people were already doing so, and by detecting the code patterns commonly used by compilers, they could make it run faster. > Call this ASMJAVA. I now assert, this is "Just java", hey, it runs in any JVM. Except, I'm shipping a new VM called "SuperExpresso" that does ahead-of-time compilation for my mobile platform based on this, and I'm telling people they don't need to use native SDKs, they can just transpile C code to Java. Did I create a new standard? I think I just did. Sure, you made a new standard. It's a backwards-compatible one that doesn't rupture the ecosystem, though. |