14 ms·

WebAssembly is a compact serialization of asm.js, not of arbitrary Javascript.

• ludamad 11y ago
  This conversation was confusing until I read this point
• DonHopkins 11y ago
  That's true of version 1, but supporting arbitrary JavaScript is on the roadmap (step 3, "everything else" [1]). Which will be awesome! What I'd love to be able to do with tools like Unity3D that compile C# and other CLR languages into asm.js, would be to pass JavaScript objects directly in and out of the C# code so you can manipulate the underlying JavaScript objects directly from C# with little or no overhead. Right now of course you can implement JSON libraries in C#, but it's indirectly and inefficiently layered on top of the flat memory model of asm.js. I want to be able to use the native JavaScript objects and libraries directly from other languages like C# that compile into JavaScript. That would be ideal! To do that, asm.js would need a way to store references to garbage collected JS objects somewhere, somehow, using proxies or handles represented in linear memory, opaque reference types [2], or some other magic like that, like Apple's JavaScript/Objective C bridging stuff [3]. [1] http://bytecrafter.blogspot.nl/2015/06/a-quick-overview-of-what-webassembly-is.html http://bytecrafter.blogspot.nl/2015/06/a-quick-overview-of-w... [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md [3] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DisplayWebContent/Tasks/JavaScriptFromObjC.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...
  • geon 11y ago
    Interesting. But then it wouldn't really be compilation, but parsing + serialization. I guess the distinction is rather pointless.