9 ms·

Other than rehashing the exact arguments and diagrams presented in the mozilla marketing material and including an extensive "interview" with a mozilla engineer

by 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.
  - 14y ago
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?

by niggler 14y ago

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.
- 14y ago

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?