

Thoughts on asm.js vs PNaCl - nkurz
http://games.greggman.com/game/thoughts-on-asm-js-vs-pnacl/

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bgirard
This article gives a good overview of NPAPI vs. PPAPI and NaCl/PNaCl. But what
it gets wrong is the primary reason why Mozilla is objecting. It's not asm.js
vs. PNaCl. It's really about HTML5 vs. PPAPI.

> [PPAPI] lets a plugin do things like audio, graphics, networking and file
> i/o in a cross platform way.

Starting to sound a lot like HTML5. Why would Mozilla take effort away from
working to bring these things as web standards and instead implement PPAPI?
PPAPI isn't a standard, it's just a prettified interface to chrome sandbox
internals.

asm.js is a great temporary hack that brings little maintenance burden (Any JS
engine will run it, doesn't require a new VM). I hope that we will some day
see a standard web bytecode in some shape but I see all this work on
PNaCl+PPAPI as engineering time that should be spent working on improving web
standards and implementations.

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avmich
I find strange the assumption that bytecode is bigger than the source. It's
not true for many programs and many languages.

Since we have interpretation phase anyway, it would be interesting to try to
optimize for size and speed of interpretation or pre-compilation.

------
_random_
Well, whichever one will allow me to use my favourite language instead of an
ugly script.

