azakai

74 ms·

931.
by azakai 12y ago
It is pretty hard to cache optimized JavaScript, I've been told, due to the generated code containing inline caches and other tricks. But at least in some cases it is possible, for example Firefox has had persistent code caching of asm
932.
by azakai 12y ago
There is some amount of cross-pollination. Mono has been using library code that Microsoft has been open-sourcing, for a while now. However, the core VMs are and will remain separate, so they are very much different projects and will remain
933.
by azakai 12y ago
I think there are 2 points - the one you said, to enable optimizations, and the other, to guide people to writing code that is easy to optimize. I guess the question is, how much better can you do, over easy-to-optimize code. Or in other wo
934.
by azakai 12y ago
In practice there have definitely been perf losses from "use strict" (emscripten used to emit it until we noticed that). "use strict" sounds easier to optimize - it's stricter - but in practice, JS engines didn&#x27
935.
by azakai 12y ago
I agree that you shouldn't . But sometimes people will make the mistake and do it, if it doesn't cause a problem on their dev machines. Then it could break on the open web. Not changing JS semantics would avoid this. All the deve
936.
by azakai 12y ago
> Any program running “correctly” in strong mode should run unchanged as ordinary JS. Thus, strong mode programs can be executed on all VMs that can handle ES6, even ones that don’t recognise the mode. This worries me. If it's runni
937.
by azakai 12y ago
Mozilla has been working on Emscripten (the compiler that helps port native games to the web), which is bundled with Unity and Unreal now. That is, it's part of their tools and not part of the browser runtime.
938.
by azakai 12y ago
Well, for Vivaldi and Opera, "all of your changes" in this case amounts to just the UI. Neither has the capability nor motivation to modify Blink in any significant way. Also, Opera has been contributing to Blink, so they aren&#x2
939.
by azakai 12y ago
To be fair to Vivaldi, Chrome isn't open source either, and lots of people use it. Chrome is of course mostly open source, except for some proprietary bits. The same is basically true of Vivaldi (and Opera), they all add a relatively s
940.
by azakai 12y ago
Furthermore, there is little reason to suspect Vivaldi might become major. It brings nothing substantially new on the tech side - it's using Blink, like Chrome and Opera, and like Opera, it only differentiates itself from Chrome on the
941.
by azakai 12y ago
Thanks for the link! Reading that, it looks pretty pessimistic actually. There seems to be nowhere near a clear path forward for how to actually do this. One concern is that stack traces are "best-effort" and not guaranteed to wor
942.
by azakai 12y ago
32-bit is enough for a 4GB typed array, which doesn't seem too bad. I imagine eventually it will be limiting, but not in the near future.
943.
by azakai 12y ago
On Firefox and WebKit (but not Chrome) you can already do that, by disabling the JIT and thereby only running in the interpreter. You do lose a large amount of speed on sites that have JS doing heavy things. However, on a lot of the web, yo
944.
by azakai 12y ago
The issue is that, for us here, "DNA being interpreted by the cell's machinery" is pretty clear. It's like instructions being "interpreted" by a virtual machine in computer science. They are executed, and somet
945.
by azakai 12y ago
For example, the changes can be other molecules aside from DNA. Like something that attaches to DNA and prevents a gene from being expressed. What makes such a thing interesting is if it persists through cell divisions, and especially inter
946.
by azakai 12y ago
> Our new awareness of epigenetics challenges genetic determinism and throws a new wrench into nature-nurture debates. It does? > Epigenetic studies show that genes alone do not determine form and function, Of course genes alone do no
947.
by azakai 12y ago
I understand your disappointment, clearly more opportunities are opened up on the main thread. As the article says, this is a proposed first step, and the main thread is trickier, so it can be considered carefully later on. Meanwhile, for a
948.
by azakai 12y ago
I agree with > If copying is fine then current Workers are good enough; if copying isn't fine, then this doesn't change that. I am saying that copying is fine (for most apps). Copying is fine because BananaBread is indeed les
949.
by azakai 12y ago
The blog post does mention the main thread, as something that is more complex and in need of further investigation. Still, even without shared memory being accessible to the main thread, I think sharing between workers can be extremely usef
950.
by azakai 12y ago
Message passing can be very efficient for some tasks. But there are cases where it is hard to optimize out copying. For example, let's say you're running a raytracer, and you have several web workers each render a slice of the fra
951.
by azakai 12y ago
There's no financial benefit there. But, for ads...
952.
by azakai 12y ago
> I have yet to meet a serious AI researcher who worries about AI ending the human race. At every AI conference I've been to lately, [the answer was always] "dude, stop it. That's such a distraction". Sure, it's
953.
by azakai 12y ago
Preventing other browsers for technical reasons is very different than doing so for policy reasons. iOS prevents other browsers in both ways. ChromeOS (and FirefoxOS, and others) might limit you technically, but do not limit you by policy.
954.
by azakai 12y ago
It is "Firefox", but it's still using the Safari rendering and JavaScript engine under the hood (like Chrome for iOS does), because there isn't an option to do otherwise.
955.
by azakai 12y ago
SQLite is kind of different from other DBs, in various ways. For example, data types, http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html It should be compatible with most DBs, but SQLite has more dynamic types, and supports more things,
956.
by azakai 12y ago
I assume that's a temporary limitation, they have lots of developers on OS X.
957.
by azakai 12y ago
Nice to see this: > HTML5 platform + WebGL is ready to use -- run your game in a compatible browser with a single click!
958.
by azakai 12y ago
Interesting, thanks!
959.
by azakai 12y ago
There are a few reasons why full speed is reached later when starting up in the emterpreter and swapping in asm.js later: * Compiling asm.js can use multiple CPU cores, so doing just that is faster than doing it while the emterpreter is run
960.
by azakai 12y ago
Actually, no - while the bytecode is smaller than asm.js, when you compress them both, they end up around the same. The issue is that the bytecode is designed for fast execution, not compressibility, so it contains absolute offsets for jump

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