5 ms·

Wow, Mozilla is making a really big marketing push for asm.js.

by niggler 14y ago

robin_reala 14y ago
What makes you think this is a marketing piece instead of a normal blog post by John?
- niggler 14y ago
  Other than rehashing the exact arguments and diagrams presented in the mozilla marketing material and including an extensive "interview" with a mozilla engineer: - I would have expected him to have tried it. There's no evidence in the post that he even fired up firefox nightly and ran even a simple test. The performance graph is straight out of asm.js marketing material - In discussing chrome's performance, he just writes "A 4-10x performance difference is substantial" without explaining why chrome's performance suffers so much relative to firefox without asm.js (take the skinning demo. Why is chrome significantly worse than firefox?) This is a point that many have discussed, including some here in various posts about asm.js - Certain sentences seem artificial. If you've read other posts by him, does "It is interesting to see such a large performance chasm appearing between Asm.js and the current engines in Firefox and Chrome. A 4-10x performance difference is substantial (this is in the realm of comparing these browsers to the performance of IE 6). Interestingly even with this performance difference many of these Asm.js demos are still usable on Chrome and Firefox, which is a good indicator for the current state of JavaScript engines. That being said their performance is simply not as good as the performance offered by a browser that is capable of optimizing Asm.js code." sound like something he would write? At all?
  - jlongster 14y ago
    It sounds more like you're looking at all of this through a strong negative filter.
    - niggler 14y ago
      If objectivity is strongly negative, so be it. You'd ask similar questions if Resig wrote an article of PNaCl without testing it himself.
  - jeresig 14y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. - I did not run performance benchmarks on my system because Asm.js does not yet support OS X (which is my primary OS). I fully intend to run some tests, and hopefully make some of my own, when that time comes. In the meantime it's not really beneficial for me to just re-run the same benchmarks that others have run on those platforms. - I thought this was obvious: Chrome and normal Firefox are so much slower because they do not explicitly optimize the Asm.js code path. - That's complete nonsense. I can't believe I have to say this but yes, I wrote those sentences.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      >- I thought this was obvious: Chrome and normal Firefox are so much slower because they do not explicitly optimize the Asm.js code path. I think the parent was asking for an explanation for why Chrome does so much worse than the non-asm.js Firefox. Which I guess is kind of a weird question given that Chrome beats non-asm.js FF in one of the three benchmarks, and is roughly tied with it in another.
      - jeresig 14y ago
        Ah! In that case I'm not sure - but according to mraleph's comment above it looks like there might be some issues in V8 for some of the benchmarks: https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2223 https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2223
        azakai 14y ago
        Overall Chrome does similar to Firefox in non-asm.js mode on most benchmarks - slower on some, faster on some. There are however a few where Chrome is significantly slower, we've filed bugs for those things. The big difference is between Firefox+asm.js and both Firefox and Chrome. http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/27 http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/27
    - niggler 14y ago
      Thanks for replying. "I did not run performance benchmarks on my system because Asm.js does not yet support OS X (which is my primary OS)." Given the relative percentage of web developers who use OSX (which is certainly non-trivial), wouldn't you think it would have been wise to state that? But I guess the more interesting question is: did you try it on a system that firefox nightly+asm.js runs on? If so, can you describe that process? Did you try writing some code by hand or try taking a dummy program and run it through emscripten? Taking a step back, it just seems really strange (and certainly many others, if this involved some other company like microsoft or google) that you would talk about performance without trying it.
  - shardling 14y ago
    Shall we run your writing through the same process, and deduce that you are employed by Google to slander Mozilla? Actually, if they turned evil they'd employ someone better at it. I'm kind of convinced you're just trolling.
    - niggler 14y ago
      Please proceed. Explain how a discussion of performance by someone who didn't actually perform the test is somehow trolling or evil. I'd say the same thing if Resig used Google or Microsoft marketing material rather than running the tests.
      - shardling 14y ago
        Heh, I didn't say you were evil, I said that a hypothetical Google astroturfing would be. My comments are pretty short. If you can't be bothered to parse them, why respond?
k3n 14y ago
You know Resig isn't employed by Mozilla anymore, right? This is just a JS enthusiast (understatement of the year, perhaps) discussing a JS topic.
- niggler 14y ago
  Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned here, but I'd expect a discussion of JS performance to be coupled with a performance test conducted by the author. Is that too much to ask?
  - k3n 14y ago
    > Is that too much to ask? If it were a paid service, perhaps not. But, it's not....the blog is a free service. Not trying to be rude, but the adage applies: you can 'take it or leave it'. I'm not sure why you feel so entitled that he seemingly owes you something. If you feel that it's inappropriate for HN, then flag it.
  - glhaynes 14y ago
    Why? If you have reasons to think that the performance tests that he references are invalid or inapplicable, those should be addressed; otherwise, why should he spend his time recreating low-level tests to talk at a higher level about the subject?
dave1010uk 14y ago
Whether this the aim of this post was marketing or not (as I believe), it's a really in depth and interesting read if you're a programmer. Even more so if you use JavaScript. It would be great if all corporate marketing was like this!

Wow, Mozilla is making a really big marketing push for asm.js.

by niggler 14y ago

Wow, Mozilla is making a really big marketing push for asm.js.

robin_reala 14y ago

What makes you think this is a marketing piece instead of a normal blog post by John?

niggler 14y ago
Other than rehashing the exact arguments and diagrams presented in the mozilla marketing material and including an extensive "interview" with a mozilla engineer: - I would have expected him to have tried it. There's no evidence in the post that he even fired up firefox nightly and ran even a simple test. The performance graph is straight out of asm.js marketing material - In discussing chrome's performance, he just writes "A 4-10x performance difference is substantial" without explaining why chrome's performance suffers so much relative to firefox without asm.js (take the skinning demo. Why is chrome significantly worse than firefox?) This is a point that many have discussed, including some here in various posts about asm.js - Certain sentences seem artificial. If you've read other posts by him, does "It is interesting to see such a large performance chasm appearing between Asm.js and the current engines in Firefox and Chrome. A 4-10x performance difference is substantial (this is in the realm of comparing these browsers to the performance of IE 6). Interestingly even with this performance difference many of these Asm.js demos are still usable on Chrome and Firefox, which is a good indicator for the current state of JavaScript engines. That being said their performance is simply not as good as the performance offered by a browser that is capable of optimizing Asm.js code." sound like something he would write? At all?
- jlongster 14y ago
  It sounds more like you're looking at all of this through a strong negative filter.
  - niggler 14y ago
    If objectivity is strongly negative, so be it. You'd ask similar questions if Resig wrote an article of PNaCl without testing it himself.
- jeresig 14y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. - I did not run performance benchmarks on my system because Asm.js does not yet support OS X (which is my primary OS). I fully intend to run some tests, and hopefully make some of my own, when that time comes. In the meantime it's not really beneficial for me to just re-run the same benchmarks that others have run on those platforms. - I thought this was obvious: Chrome and normal Firefox are so much slower because they do not explicitly optimize the Asm.js code path. - That's complete nonsense. I can't believe I have to say this but yes, I wrote those sentences.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >- I thought this was obvious: Chrome and normal Firefox are so much slower because they do not explicitly optimize the Asm.js code path. I think the parent was asking for an explanation for why Chrome does so much worse than the non-asm.js Firefox. Which I guess is kind of a weird question given that Chrome beats non-asm.js FF in one of the three benchmarks, and is roughly tied with it in another.
    - jeresig 14y ago
      Ah! In that case I'm not sure - but according to mraleph's comment above it looks like there might be some issues in V8 for some of the benchmarks: https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2223 https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2223
      - azakai 14y ago
        Overall Chrome does similar to Firefox in non-asm.js mode on most benchmarks - slower on some, faster on some. There are however a few where Chrome is significantly slower, we've filed bugs for those things. The big difference is between Firefox+asm.js and both Firefox and Chrome. http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/27 http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/27
  - niggler 14y ago
    Thanks for replying. "I did not run performance benchmarks on my system because Asm.js does not yet support OS X (which is my primary OS)." Given the relative percentage of web developers who use OSX (which is certainly non-trivial), wouldn't you think it would have been wise to state that? But I guess the more interesting question is: did you try it on a system that firefox nightly+asm.js runs on? If so, can you describe that process? Did you try writing some code by hand or try taking a dummy program and run it through emscripten? Taking a step back, it just seems really strange (and certainly many others, if this involved some other company like microsoft or google) that you would talk about performance without trying it.
- shardling 14y ago
  Shall we run your writing through the same process, and deduce that you are employed by Google to slander Mozilla? Actually, if they turned evil they'd employ someone better at it. I'm kind of convinced you're just trolling.
  - niggler 14y ago
    Please proceed. Explain how a discussion of performance by someone who didn't actually perform the test is somehow trolling or evil. I'd say the same thing if Resig used Google or Microsoft marketing material rather than running the tests.
    - shardling 14y ago
      Heh, I didn't say you were evil, I said that a hypothetical Google astroturfing would be. My comments are pretty short. If you can't be bothered to parse them, why respond?

k3n 14y ago

You know Resig isn't employed by Mozilla anymore, right? This is just a JS enthusiast (understatement of the year, perhaps) discussing a JS topic.

niggler 14y ago
Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned here, but I'd expect a discussion of JS performance to be coupled with a performance test conducted by the author. Is that too much to ask?
- k3n 14y ago
  > Is that too much to ask? If it were a paid service, perhaps not. But, it's not....the blog is a free service. Not trying to be rude, but the adage applies: you can 'take it or leave it'. I'm not sure why you feel so entitled that he seemingly owes you something. If you feel that it's inappropriate for HN, then flag it.
- glhaynes 14y ago
  Why? If you have reasons to think that the performance tests that he references are invalid or inapplicable, those should be addressed; otherwise, why should he spend his time recreating low-level tests to talk at a higher level about the subject?

dave1010uk 14y ago

Whether this the aim of this post was marketing or not (as I believe), it's a really in depth and interesting read if you're a programmer. Even more so if you use JavaScript. It would be great if all corporate marketing was like this!