> I take issue with calling this JavaScript/HTML5. This is powered by asm.js. It is faster with asm.js optimizations, but as other comments mention, it also ru

> I take issue with calling this JavaScript/HTML5. This is powered by asm.js. It is faster with asm.js optimizations, but as other comments mention, it also runs well (depending on CPU/GPU) even without such optimizations, in browsers that have no special asm.js optimizations whatsoever. All the demo needs to work is WebGL and JavaScript. > The source is emphatically NOT JavaScript, it's a subset that's meant to be a target for compilation It is not 'typical' JavaScript, but it literally is JavaScript since it's a subset. > (like a bytecode in .NET and the JVM) and is treated entirely differently from JavaScript by the JIT. Only in some cases (Firefox 22 and 23) is it treated in a special way, and as mentioned above, the demo works great in other cases as well, that treat it like normal JavaScript (Firefox 20 stable, for example). Even when it is treated in a special way, it still uses the same parser and same backend and optimizations (IonMonkey) as the Firefox JS engine uses for all JS. > We don't call everything that runs on .NET C# nor everything that runs on the JVM Java. The main difference is that .NET and the JVM have bytecodes. C# is not .NET bytecode and Java is not JVM bytecode. But, JavaScript does not have a universal bytecode, there is just the language itself. So asm.js is literally JavaScript, not some lower-level bytecode. It runs like normal JavaScript, the only difference is that some JS engines might optimize it a little better, since it's easy to optimize. Note that asm.js-like code is nothing new. It's been generated for years now by compilers like Emscripten and Mandreel, and Firefox and Chrome (and likely others) have been optimizing for it, for example Google added a Mandreel benchmark to Octane. (The only thing new with asm.js is that there is a formal typesystem which makes it simple to make sure you emit proper code, and simple to verify you are receiving proper code; also, while developing the type system some bugs in how emscripten generates code were found and resolved.)