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Well, that seems to be what Google is doing with PNaCl and pepper.js. Pepper.js uses emscripten to compile PNaCl apps so they run in JS (specifically asm.js). I

by azakai 13y ago

Well, that seems to be what Google is doing with PNaCl and pepper.js. Pepper.js uses emscripten to compile PNaCl apps so they run in JS (specifically asm.js). In Chrome the PNaCl version can run, and everywhere else it runs in JS. That sounds like what you are proposing? You can try that approach out right now, http://www.flohofwoe.net/demos.html http://www.flohofwoe.net/demos.html http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/examples.html http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/examples.html Those two sites have the same codebases built for both PNaCl and asm.js. Overall they run pretty well in both, so this doesn't seem to show a clear advantage to either JS or a non-JS bytecode. PNaCl starts more slowly, but then runs more quickly, but even those differences are not that big. And surely both PNaCl will get faster to start up, and JS get faster to run, because there is no reason they both cannot get pretty much to native speed in both startup and execution. Note though that there are risks to this approach. No one enforces that everyone create dual builds of this nature, and there is no guarantee that the dual builds will be equivalent. So while this is interesting to do, it does open up a whole set of compatibility risks, which could fragment the web.

cdash 13y ago
Except for the fact that you can not compile threaded programs to javascript I am pretty sure while you can to PNaCl and this is my problem with this talk of asm.js, until it supports threads I don't really consider it an acceptable solution.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  And people keep mentioning those 'Web Workers' as if Emscripten is capable of generating them from LLVM thread abstractions.
  - flohofwoe 13y ago
    Nope, it's a better idea to create a higher level thread-pool-based parallel-task-system which abstracts away the differences between pthreads and WebWorkers. I think that at least most game engines have such a system in place anyway, and can be relatively easily adopted. YMMV because it may be more overhead to get data in and out of WebWorkers since they don't have a shared address space (so in that regard they are more like processes).

by azakai 13y ago

cdash 13y ago

Except for the fact that you can not compile threaded programs to javascript I am pretty sure while you can to PNaCl and this is my problem with this talk of asm.js, until it supports threads I don't really consider it an acceptable solution.

CmonDev 13y ago
And people keep mentioning those 'Web Workers' as if Emscripten is capable of generating them from LLVM thread abstractions.
- flohofwoe 13y ago
  Nope, it's a better idea to create a higher level thread-pool-based parallel-task-system which abstracts away the differences between pthreads and WebWorkers. I think that at least most game engines have such a system in place anyway, and can be relatively easily adopted. YMMV because it may be more overhead to get data in and out of WebWorkers since they don't have a shared address space (so in that regard they are more like processes).