<story><title>Asm.js: The JavaScript Compile Target</title><url>http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joblessjunkie</author><text>Where everyone seems to be focused on performance, it strikes me that performance is just the flip side of &lt;i&gt;efficiency&lt;/i&gt;, and that asm.js might be a great way to stretch battery life on mobile. Will asm.js web pages run with less power than traditional JS? Also I suspect this can help with the sluggish performance of mobile browsers in general.</text></comment>
<story><title>Asm.js: The JavaScript Compile Target</title><url>http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>This is the first I&apos;ve heard of Portable Native Client (PNaCl), which sounds very interesting.&lt;p&gt;I think ASM is a great idea for &quot;hacking&quot;, but the thing that doesn&apos;t make a lot of sense to me, is that you&apos;re usually only going to bother compiling to ASM for things which need the performance. The idea that they&apos;ll &quot;still work&quot; in non-optimized browsers doesn&apos;t seem too convincing -- games would probably be unplayable, and you&apos;d see messages saying &quot;This game only supports Firefox&quot; etc.&lt;p&gt;And I don&apos;t see there being that many things written in C, etc., that one would want to port to the web, that &lt;i&gt;aren&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; particularly processor-intensive.&lt;p&gt;Presumably PNaCl would be close to native code speed, a big improvement over ASM. And it seems like what&apos;s needed is cross-platform &lt;i&gt;fast&lt;/i&gt; execution -- not backwards compatibility with JavaScript that will still run, but run much more slowly.&lt;p&gt;But nevertheless, it&apos;s super-interesting watching what&apos;s going on with ASM.</text></comment>