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Possibly yes, depending on the language. For CoffeeScript likely not, it is very close to normal JS, and lacks types. For Dart, I don't know enough about how t

by azakai 14y ago

Possibly yes, depending on the language. For CoffeeScript likely not, it is very close to normal JS, and lacks types. For Dart, I don't know enough about how the VM works. But in general, a language like Dart could work. For example, LuaJIT or PyPy could be ported, the C parts compiled into asm.js, and the JITs would need a new backend that emits asm.js instead of x86 or ARM. This could potentially make a language like Lua, Python, Dart, etc. very fast on the web. However, how feasible it is would depend on the VM architecture. I hope to work on this kind of stuff later this year.

cromwellian 14y ago
The problem is, you'll end up porting those language's Garbage Collectors as well. I don't think it's that practical to compile GC'ed languages to asm.js until GC support is added. The GCs that are in Firefox and Chrome are very efficient low pause collectors, and IMHO, you really don't want to reimplement collector in JS, especially since you can't take advantage of OS/MMU features, and can't do multithreaded collection, etc. Also, if you consider something like the Java Virtual Machine, it's practical to make it work on NaCL, but JS doesn't support blocking/synchronous calls, and how earth would you make all of those synchronous APIs, and multithreaded APIs work in that context? asm.js is not isomorphic to NaCL in terms of feature set, but asm.js + something like OpenCL could probably work well for games.
- azakai 14y ago
  GCing is a concern, yes. With the Binary Data API and some extensions, it might be possible down the road to have GC'd objects in asm.js compiled code. Definitely an interesting area to investigate. Multhreading is another concern, if you want shared state (with the JVM would need). It can't currently be done, but again, is worth thinking about and perhaps new web APIs could enable it some day.

by azakai 14y ago

cromwellian 14y ago

The problem is, you'll end up porting those language's Garbage Collectors as well. I don't think it's that practical to compile GC'ed languages to asm.js until GC support is added. The GCs that are in Firefox and Chrome are very efficient low pause collectors, and IMHO, you really don't want to reimplement collector in JS, especially since you can't take advantage of OS/MMU features, and can't do multithreaded collection, etc. Also, if you consider something like the Java Virtual Machine, it's practical to make it work on NaCL, but JS doesn't support blocking/synchronous calls, and how earth would you make all of those synchronous APIs, and multithreaded APIs work in that context? asm.js is not isomorphic to NaCL in terms of feature set, but asm.js + something like OpenCL could probably work well for games.

azakai 14y ago
GCing is a concern, yes. With the Binary Data API and some extensions, it might be possible down the road to have GC'd objects in asm.js compiled code. Definitely an interesting area to investigate. Multhreading is another concern, if you want shared state (with the JVM would need). It can't currently be done, but again, is worth thinking about and perhaps new web APIs could enable it some day.