> If Opera/Dolphin/Safari/whatever don't ever implement optimizations for asm.js, its not really cross-platform anymore. Sure, theoretically they can execute the code, but the performance will be so far from the expectations of the developer that they will just end up telling the user to switch to Firefox (maybe Chrome if they can ever catch up).
I'm not sure that's really true. It doesn't have to be ultra-fast, just good enough.
> If it were as simple as you make it out to be, we would have hundreds of languages compiling to asm.js by now; C/C++, but also every language that compiles to C/C++ or LLVM bytecode. As it is, we have maybe a couple dozen large legacy codebases that have been ported.
Er, well, there aren't many languages which compile to native code. People can't compile Java, C#, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. to native code. C/C++ do compile to native code, however.
> Ha. You obviously haven't tried to do that yet.
Oh, I have. I realise it has some difficulty to it.
> If getting the performance that asm.js developers expect out of asm.js requires the use of a browser that optimizes for asm.js, then the solution isn't cross-platform. In fact, it isn't really any better than NaCL, god forbid.
I'm not sure what you think asm.js is the solution to. Its purpose is for running native applications in the browser. It's not for making ordinary JS apps run fast.
I'm not sure that's really true. It doesn't have to be ultra-fast, just good enough.
> If it were as simple as you make it out to be, we would have hundreds of languages compiling to asm.js by now; C/C++, but also every language that compiles to C/C++ or LLVM bytecode. As it is, we have maybe a couple dozen large legacy codebases that have been ported.
Er, well, there aren't many languages which compile to native code. People can't compile Java, C#, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. to native code. C/C++ do compile to native code, however.
> Ha. You obviously haven't tried to do that yet.
Oh, I have. I realise it has some difficulty to it.
> If getting the performance that asm.js developers expect out of asm.js requires the use of a browser that optimizes for asm.js, then the solution isn't cross-platform. In fact, it isn't really any better than NaCL, god forbid.
I'm not sure what you think asm.js is the solution to. Its purpose is for running native applications in the browser. It's not for making ordinary JS apps run fast.