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iOS and Android are successful because they offer a great selection of powerful APIs, not because of the particular binary representation they use for applicati

iOS and Android are successful because they offer a great selection of powerful APIs, not because of the particular binary representation they use for applications. NaCl actually offers crappier APIs than the Web platform, and it runs in a box where it can't directly manipulate the real Web APIs. asm.js is intriguing because it offers a very natural path to a foreign function interface to all the stuff exposed to JS.

skatepark 14y ago
> iOS and Android are successful because they offer a great selection of powerful APIs, not because of the particular binary representation they use for applications. They also provide great battery life and user-visible performance (iOS especially), have incredibly well integrated development tools (see Apple's Instruments and its power, CPU, syscall, et al profiling), and give software authors the escape hatches they need to maximize performance when absolutely necessary. It's not just a question of nice APIs. Layering another level of JavaScript spit and bubblegum on top of the problem is t going to make any of the above easier.