5 ms·

Yup, when you consider that WASM can be polyfilled with Asm.js it's pretty obvious where things were headed.

jfbastien 9y ago
Except with all browser vendors being involved with WebAssembly, efficient polyfill-ability hasn't been a goal for a while.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  WASM has 64-bit ints, did asm.js support those? How can you polyfill that without a real slowdown.
  - recursive 9y ago
    A property with getter and setter backed by singleton typed array instance?
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      "without a real slowdown" Any operation, like 64-bit adds/muls/divs/etc would have to call emulation functions. It'll be orders of magnitude slower.
wyldfire 9y ago
What does that mean: "polyfilled with asm.js"?
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  That you can run asm.js code on wasm.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    I suppose I should have asked "what does polyfill mean in this context?" Does that term really alias "run [it] on" or is there something more subtle about this term's meaning?
    - __s 9y ago
      There's a high performance asm.js implementation of WASM (converting WASM to asm.js at runtime). ie if a browser didn't implement WASM, but had a JIT which executed asm.js at high speed, it could execute WASM at high speed
      - azakai 9y ago
        There isn't such a polyfill. There is currently no good tool to translate wasm into asm.js (or general JS) on the client. The best that exists is to run the wasm in a wasm interpreter, very slowly. In theory a translator could be written into asm.js, but there would still be wasm code that won't run fast, such as 64-bit ints, unaligned loads and stores, bitcasts, and other operations.
        johncolanduoni 9y ago
        Yes, but emscripten can compile to both (with or without using the new native LLVM WebAssembly backend). It's stretching the word polyfill, but emscripten users have pretty close to a turnkey solution for producing code that detects WebAssembly support and falls back to asm.js.
    - jholman 9y ago
      Web developers, bless their hearts, feel uncomfortable with the word "emulate", so they use "polyfill", or sometimes the more general "shim". To some degree, "polyfill" implies that the functionality being emulated/shimmed is functionality that is under some other circumstances is expected to be provided by the browser itself.

Except with all browser vendors being involved with WebAssembly, efficient polyfill-ability hasn't been a goal for a while.

cromwellian 9y ago
WASM has 64-bit ints, did asm.js support those? How can you polyfill that without a real slowdown.
- recursive 9y ago
  A property with getter and setter backed by singleton typed array instance?
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    "without a real slowdown" Any operation, like 64-bit adds/muls/divs/etc would have to call emulation functions. It'll be orders of magnitude slower.

wyldfire 9y ago

What does that mean: "polyfilled with asm.js"?

bitmapbrother 9y ago
That you can run asm.js code on wasm.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  I suppose I should have asked "what does polyfill mean in this context?" Does that term really alias "run [it] on" or is there something more subtle about this term's meaning?
  - __s 9y ago
    There's a high performance asm.js implementation of WASM (converting WASM to asm.js at runtime). ie if a browser didn't implement WASM, but had a JIT which executed asm.js at high speed, it could execute WASM at high speed
    - azakai 9y ago
      There isn't such a polyfill. There is currently no good tool to translate wasm into asm.js (or general JS) on the client. The best that exists is to run the wasm in a wasm interpreter, very slowly. In theory a translator could be written into asm.js, but there would still be wasm code that won't run fast, such as 64-bit ints, unaligned loads and stores, bitcasts, and other operations.
      - johncolanduoni 9y ago
        Yes, but emscripten can compile to both (with or without using the new native LLVM WebAssembly backend). It's stretching the word polyfill, but emscripten users have pretty close to a turnkey solution for producing code that detects WebAssembly support and falls back to asm.js.
  - jholman 9y ago
    Web developers, bless their hearts, feel uncomfortable with the word "emulate", so they use "polyfill", or sometimes the more general "shim". To some degree, "polyfill" implies that the functionality being emulated/shimmed is functionality that is under some other circumstances is expected to be provided by the browser itself.