alt Hacker NewsSaying goodbye to asm.js
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That's sad but sensical. Fun fact, Figma originally started as a fully C++ codebase, and Asm.js was key in proving that it would be possible to run a design tool in the browser. The switch to WebAssembly didn't happen until after there were paying customers, and provided nice improvements to load time (Asm.js is still JS which the bundle size is bigger and requires the code to be parsed into an AST, unlike WASM).
So the death of asm.js is upon us? We are drifting away from the timeline of the prophecy:
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
(And to those who haven't encountered this before, I strongly recommend a watch. It may be the greatest tech talk of all time, for certain values of greatest.)
I’ll never forget watching Gary Bernhardt give his talk on JavaScript.[0] Was my introduction to asm.js, and the rabbithole associated with compiling code to run in the browser.
12 years on, it’s shocking how much of his fiction became reality.
[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
A long time ago, I wrote a small chapter in a WebGL book on asm.js.
https://webglinsights.github.io/
It was fun to see the rise of asm.js, which was a precursor to Web Assembly. Some of the early demos were so cool to see; Unreal Engine running in the browser. :) Bitter sweet to see the sun set here, but it did lead to much better things.
Hmmm, need a asm.js -> WASM transpiler maybe.
(compiling legacy code with legacy versions of Emscripten is quite frustrating, almost as bad as updating your JS code to be compatible with accumulated changes in the Emscripten ABI)
I remember when Mozilla released OdinMonkey that was hyper-specialized for asm.js code, the Chrome / V8 team instead worked on general-purpose optimizations in their JIT that would run normal JavaScript faster but also would help asm.js. The difference in speed was 2-4x in favor of Firefox, and they hyped it a lot :D
Nowadays most browser JavaScript VMs converged to very similar designs and optimizations, so even without Odin asm.js code would run pretty fast anyway.
I personally think this is a mistake. But I'm not sure how much it matters. It's not like a lot of people were using asm.js still AFAIK.
But wasm is too isolated from javascript. From my limited use of it, I was considering trying to compile to asmjs instead.
But I wasn't sure that emscripten still fully supported it.
You can't call most web apis from wasm.
But more important for what i was trying to do, you can't zero copy buffers from js to wasm.
Everything is a trade off. The isolation is a good thing, but also a bad thing.
:(
this was such a crazy project. remember when we compiled our c++ to wasm over 10 years ago, wait, this works?! web seemed to move so fast then.
Isn't Asm.js better just for the fact that I can call web apis directly without shims? Or moving data in and out? I'd love to commit totally to webassembly but still seems very limited, am I wrong?
There goes my plan to use js code generation at runtime to make my algorithms faster. Doing this with wasm will be much harder.
Never saw those monkey prints before
https://monkeyink.com/ink/blog/archives/2016/08/_this_is_a_f...
"The image is a collage of antique open source art reflecting the open source code."
We'll drink again in Valhalla (not the JDK project, the one with much carousing).
What I liked about asm.js is that it's "just" javascript and you don't need any special way to load them, while with wasm you have the wasm file which you need to load on the side, which is a bit clunkier. But eh it's a tiny thing
It would have been nice if they had mentioned Luke Wagner, who's idea it all was and who created the first implementation, as well as one of the main driving forces behind wasm.
Asm.js was never needed as a legacy mechanism, as it was just a compilation target for native code. There was nothing that it needed to remain backwards compatible with, all asm.js code was new code.
Sad day. I have a sha256 hasher in asm.js that's faster than any wasm solution.
[dead]
o7
asm.js is faster than WASM, and it can do everything that JS can do.
> 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.