4 ms·

People on HN complain about Emscripten being the devil's work, and now here is someone asking for pthread support? I need to go sit down...

sitkack 12y ago
All of those people work on Chrome.
- ndesaulniers 12y ago
  With SIMD in JS, PNaCl and Dart VM become increasingly irrelevant. Now all that stands in the way is shared memory.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    >> Now all that stands in the way is shared memory. Also a legacy language people are forced to use.
    - ndesaulniers 12y ago
      For a legacy language people are forced to use, take a look at the implementation languages of these browser engines.
  - ahoge 12y ago
    SIMD makes JS a better compile target. The Dart VM is still more "lightweight" (it has to generate a lot less native code) and it offers much faster startup (10x). There also aren't deoptimization traps scattered all over the place. The performance is very predictable. As far as the VM itself is concerned, it doesn't really matter if other browser start to support Dart natively. The VM is extremely useful for development, you can embed it in native applications, and you can use it to write web servers and other command line tools.
    - ndesaulniers 12y ago
      Startup compared to v8. v8 compiles all JS to bytecode first, which is where it gets poorer startup time compared to SpiderMonkey's interpreter, or JavaScriptCore's handwritten assembly interpreter. How many people are using the Dart VM outside of Dartium? Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?
      - spankalee 12y ago
        Worried about what?
      - ahoge 12y ago
        It's not like SpiderMonkey starts up instantaneously. Also, an interpreter is of course slower than the quick and dirty native code generated by V8. JSC doesn't seem to have an advantage in the extremely short-running SunSpider benchmark suite. Dart's snapshots are also something you just can't do with JavaScript, because the program structure is created imperatively with JS. You have to run quite a bit of code before you can actually run the program itself. > Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried? Worried about what? Why would you care anyways? Do you also get worried if some game uses a Lua VM? I use Dart for pretty much everything. Command line tools, web servers, and client-side scripting. It's an excellent choice for the things I do and the things I want to do. It's a better fit than Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, or PHP. I still do use those languages occasionally, but Dart is my primary language now.
        sitkack 12y ago
        Mike Pall would disagree with you about interpreter vs compiler.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    And here I was hoping it would be JS that would become irrelevant.
    - ndesaulniers 12y ago
      That's not going to happen any time soon. Would you break the web?
      - duaneb 12y ago
        JS already broke the web....

sitkack 12y ago

All of those people work on Chrome.

ndesaulniers 12y ago
With SIMD in JS, PNaCl and Dart VM become increasingly irrelevant. Now all that stands in the way is shared memory.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  >> Now all that stands in the way is shared memory. Also a legacy language people are forced to use.
  - ndesaulniers 12y ago
    For a legacy language people are forced to use, take a look at the implementation languages of these browser engines.
- ahoge 12y ago
  SIMD makes JS a better compile target. The Dart VM is still more "lightweight" (it has to generate a lot less native code) and it offers much faster startup (10x). There also aren't deoptimization traps scattered all over the place. The performance is very predictable. As far as the VM itself is concerned, it doesn't really matter if other browser start to support Dart natively. The VM is extremely useful for development, you can embed it in native applications, and you can use it to write web servers and other command line tools.
  - ndesaulniers 12y ago
    Startup compared to v8. v8 compiles all JS to bytecode first, which is where it gets poorer startup time compared to SpiderMonkey's interpreter, or JavaScriptCore's handwritten assembly interpreter. How many people are using the Dart VM outside of Dartium? Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?
    - spankalee 12y ago
      Worried about what?
    - ahoge 12y ago
      It's not like SpiderMonkey starts up instantaneously. Also, an interpreter is of course slower than the quick and dirty native code generated by V8. JSC doesn't seem to have an advantage in the extremely short-running SunSpider benchmark suite. Dart's snapshots are also something you just can't do with JavaScript, because the program structure is created imperatively with JS. You have to run quite a bit of code before you can actually run the program itself. > Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried? Worried about what? Why would you care anyways? Do you also get worried if some game uses a Lua VM? I use Dart for pretty much everything. Command line tools, web servers, and client-side scripting. It's an excellent choice for the things I do and the things I want to do. It's a better fit than Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, or PHP. I still do use those languages occasionally, but Dart is my primary language now.
      - sitkack 12y ago
        Mike Pall would disagree with you about interpreter vs compiler.
- duaneb 12y ago
  And here I was hoping it would be JS that would become irrelevant.
  - ndesaulniers 12y ago
    That's not going to happen any time soon. Would you break the web?
    - duaneb 12y ago
      JS already broke the web....