back to the original, will d compile to asm.js?
On Saturday, 23 March 2013 at 02:20:33 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Maybe you remember the NaCl or PNaCl plug-in from Google, that
allows to safely run code at near native speed on the browser
(only 10-30% speed loss, in a probably safe sandbox). This
plug-in seems interesting, but so far I think it's not getting
a lot of traction, and it seems Mozilla is not interested in it.
Now on Reddit they have linked "asm.js". It's an easy to
compile subset of JavaScript, that contains type annotations
(inside comments, so it's still valid standard JavaScript).
Mozilla has created a modified version of its JIT that
recognizes asm.js code and compiles it ahead of time to give,
they say, about half the speed of native code (if it's not
recognized, it's seen as normal JS). Even if this speed will
increase a little with time, I think it will keep being a
little slower than NaCl code, but maybe for lot of people the
speed of asm.js will be enough (and the safety of NaCl is not
so certain).
A modified version of Emscripten (a LLVM bytecode to JavaScript
compiler) outputs asm.js. So if you have C/C++ code, with
Emscripten and some parts of LLVM you compile it to asm.js, and
then Firefox Nightly recognizes it (there is an annotation).
So given the LDC2 project, maybe with LDC+Emscripten+asm.js
there is a chance to see D on the web. I think someone will be
happy to use D instead of C/C++ on the web for
performance-sensitive code, like games. This is a small window
of opportunity for D.
Bye,
bearophile
