Again, the question is what you mean by "specifically". The v8 team look at asm.js benchmarks and make changes in v8 to make those benchmarks run faster, that'

Again, the question is what you mean by "specifically". The v8 team look at asm.js benchmarks and make changes in v8 to make those benchmarks run faster, that's clear from their announcements. At the same time, those optimizations can also make other code faster, as they try to make them general optimizations as much as possible. So it's not true it's a "side-effect", since some of the time they literally start the process by looking at asm.js code, and finding how to make it run faster on v8. So asm.js is in a sense directly responsible for the optimization, and asm.js is sped up by it. But at the same time, the optimization added is - unlike Firefox's approach - relatively general, and helps other code too. In the end, I don't think there is any disagreement between us here.