Mozilla releases support today..

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/52.0/releasenotes/

“Added support for WebAssembly, an emerging standard that brings near-native 
performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use of 
plugins.”

From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2017 10:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Partial WebAssembly backend

Yup, WebAsm is now enabled in modern browsers, thanks to a stable API for 
several releases. It's amazing how quickly this was defined and got 
implemented! (Unlike es6 modules, es2015, going on 2 years late!).

An interesting intro:
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webassembly/
Four browsers commit to current API (also above)
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webassembly/2017Feb/0002.html
.. and it looks like latest dev releases have it turned on by default, rather 
than via flags.

It's not gonna kill JavaScript but it may provide entry for other languages, as 
long as they can be compiled to LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine). The issue is 
getting the standard libraries converted. C/C++ are go, as I understand it. I 
think Fortran too!

   -- Owen

On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Marcus Daniels 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
[mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On 
Behalf Of Pip Cet
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2017 9:30 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Partial WebAssembly backend

I'd like to announce a WebAssembly backend for the GNU toolchain (binutils, 
gcc, glibc) that I've been working on for a while.

WebAssembly (https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/) is an object file 
format for a virtual machine implementing conventional 32-bit integer/64-bit 
floating-point arithmetic. Version 1 has been released on February 28 
(https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webassembly/2017Feb/0002.html),
and enabled in various browsers, including Mozilla.

This binutils port produces and deals with ELF files containing WebAssembly 
code; WebAssembly modules (in the WebAssembly object file
format) can be output using special linker scripts and -Obinary, but they 
cannot be used as input for any of the binutils programs at present.

(While the gcc port, in particular, makes some decisions that negatively affect 
performance, the binutils port is quite general and should permit the assembly, 
linking, and manipulation of all WebAssembly code, provided it is still 
encapsulated in ELF files).

The code is at https://github.com/pipcet/binutils-gdb, included from the larger 
project at https://github.com/pipcet/asmjs. Some documentation is available at 
https://github.com/pipcet/asmjs/blob/everything/wasm32.org (specific to the 
wasm32 target) and https://github.com/pipcet/asmjs/blob/everything/asmjs.org 
(for all three targets: asmjs, wasm32, and wasm64). The GitHub sources include 
support for using asm.js instead of wasm, and some rudimentary support for 
simulating a 64-bit machine using wasm.

I'd appreciate any questions, comments or advice, and in particular I'd like to 
ask whether it is possible in theory to include this backend in the standard 
GNU binutils distribution; some work would be required on my end to do that, 
and I'm not sure it's worth the effort if there is no chance of inclusion at 
the end of the process.

If anyone else has been or is planning to work on a WebAssembly backend, it 
would be great to hear from them, and maybe some of my code could be reused for 
that.

Pip Cet
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