Things took a while because vendors had their own prior paths to pursue, while asm.js had to prove it could get close enough to native perf. (You could say Mozilla's prior path was JS.)
Tools for JS are pretty good; VS does TypeScript and JS, will do wasm. Firefox devtools are giving Chrome devtools a run for their (bigger) money.
I think tools are the least of it, while agreeing they make a difference (see Mandreel with VS integration, vs. Emscripten).
NaCl (PNaCl, you must mean) never went cross browser as such, nor could it. WebAssembly is the PNaCl end-game, and a pretty good one.
As for Emscripten, it's a huge win that both Unity and Epic (Unreal Engine) support JS/WebGL as first-class targets. This happened over the last few years, tools built into the game engines. Doesn't disprove your point, you could be right! Let's find out.
Hey Brendan, thanks for not flipping a huge bird to the web community and sticking with it.
For myself, I've had very little to complain about web development since '08 or '09. It became an application platform for me with the emergence of the canvas tag, and since then it has grown into a full operating environment of sorts. There have always been awkward and limiting features to the web because it is such a hodgepodge and I think that's where most of the complaints come from. But the browser compatibility situation continues to improve, which has always been my biggest gripe.
I worry a bit about the exploit potential of WebAssembly as more features are layered atop what Asm.js offers. Don't add too much, okay? ;)
I see any web-scale runtime standard inevitably having versions spread across the installed base of any server, so prone to the same pressure JS was, which led to polyfills, graceful degradation, object detection, monkey-patching in full. People who complain about this are complaining about physics.
You're right to worry about security, which is why the "MVP" for wasm is co-expressive with asm.js, just faster-to-parse syntax. After that, we must be even more careful.
Not to mention that you still have the option of using vanilla ES5 as long as you like (and it's what I'm doing until I can move to a VS version with built-in TypeScript/ES6/JSX support). That's one of the best things about working with JavaScript: nobody is going to stop supporting the older version anytime soon.
Things took a while because vendors had their own prior paths to pursue, while asm.js had to prove it could get close enough to native perf. (You could say Mozilla's prior path was JS.)
Tools for JS are pretty good; VS does TypeScript and JS, will do wasm. Firefox devtools are giving Chrome devtools a run for their (bigger) money.
I think tools are the least of it, while agreeing they make a difference (see Mandreel with VS integration, vs. Emscripten).
NaCl (PNaCl, you must mean) never went cross browser as such, nor could it. WebAssembly is the PNaCl end-game, and a pretty good one.
As for Emscripten, it's a huge win that both Unity and Epic (Unreal Engine) support JS/WebGL as first-class targets. This happened over the last few years, tools built into the game engines. Doesn't disprove your point, you could be right! Let's find out.