> That title is making it sound like the changes were aimed at making that one case faster, when they weren't. No, the changes were certainly aimed at making t

> That title is making it sound like the changes were aimed at making that one case faster, when they weren't. No, the changes were certainly aimed at making the case of asm.js code faster. As in the links I posted above, Google has announced they are optimizing for asm.js and that they achieved large speedups on it, they mention it very specifically, http://culturemass.com/2013/05/17/google-io-2013-keynote-part-ii/ http://culturemass.com/2013/05/17/google-io-2013-keynote-par... http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/announcing-octane-20.html http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/announcing-octane-20.html > And them adding a library to their benchmark doesn't in any way mean that they aim to optimize for it No, it exactly means that: Adding it to Google's main benchmark means that they consider it representative of important real-world code, and hence that optimizing for that benchmark means you are optimizing for the right stuff. As the Octane FAQ says, >> " Octane aims to be representative of actual workloads and execution profiles of real web applications. Octane's goal is to be a proxy for the JavaScript application that you'll encounter when running browser games, highly-interactive web pages or online productivity tools." https://developers.google.com/octane/faq https://developers.google.com/octane/faq