Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/05/07/bringing-asm-js-to-chakra-microsoft-edge/

by leo2urlevan • 11 years ago

188 86 11 years ago

blogs.windows.com

dicroce• 11 years ago

Come on Google! Support asm.js in Chrome.... Give up on Native Client.... Even Microsoft is doing Asm.js now....

Why? Last I heard, Chrome is going long on their JIT and trying to get it to automatically squeeze the same performance out of asm.js code as the others, without special shortcuts. These "real" optimizations can then seamlessly be applied outside of asm.js code.

Isn't that something that benefits us all? I'm happy they're trying, at least.

bmurphy1976• 11 years ago

That's cool that they are trying, but what's the opportunity cost of not doing it? How much effort would it be to simply optimize asm.js now and then undo the optimization later when the core JIT gets smarter?

Seems to me THAT is the way to go, but this is not my area of expertise.

jlongster2• 11 years ago

While you are correct that the actual runtime speed in theory should be able to be achieved with the JIT, there are other advantages to officially supporting asm.js. One of the main things is ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation which compiles the asm.js code directly to assembly immediately after it's parsed. This gives you predictability (you literally get warnings in the console if it couldn't compile), which is really big for comprehending performance.

ndesaulniers2• 11 years ago

Why does it have to be mutually exclusive? It's more work, but Google has more $$$ to spend than say Mozilla.

ianetaylor• 11 years ago

To be fair to google they are supporting asm.js, just with a different implementation design. Native Client is orthogonal.

teacup503• 11 years ago

Why? asm.js is a hack relative to NaCL.

acdha• 11 years ago

There's no need to be disparaging – NaCL is more ambitious but asm.js has a backwards compatibility path. Both are valid engineering decisions, particularly since it's really easy to imagine a world where if NaCL delivers some major benefits the same toolchain could generate both for a seamless upgrade.

flohofwoe5• 11 years ago

In the end there's not much difference between PNaCl and asm.js (see for yourself: http://floooh.github.io/oryol/). Both compile down to 'immutable' machine code, either via JIT or AOT compilation, both call into the same browser API backends, both are based on LLVM (actually PNaCl and emscripten use the same modified LLVM frontend) both have somewhat similar restrictions what APIs can be called in threads, the only real difference is whether a pthreads-style threading model is supported or not (PNaCl does, asm.js does not, but work is underway at Mozilla to implement a true pthreads-style model via SharedArrayBuffer).

ndesaulniers2• 11 years ago

This kind of remark is getting pretty childish. On some level, all technology is black magic or "hacks". With a little bit of understanding, you learn all "hacks" are petty card tricks.

cpeterso2• 11 years ago

Does NaCl have any advantage over asm.js other than implementation aesthetics?

WorldWideWayne3• 11 years ago

I want less things emulated via Javascript and more stuff done directly via native code. Everything that is built on top of HTML/JS/CSS is basically a hack that is trying to emulate much better native platforms and it sucks. Why advocate to stay there? Let's go in the other direction in my opinion.

flohofwoe5• 11 years ago

On the other hand, for the first time in history, you have true "write once run everywhere". I can take my native C/C++ GL demos that normally run on the desktop, compile them to asm.js, distribute them via a simple URL, and users just click on a link and run the demo on every OS. No download and installation, no browser warnings about dangerous executables, no virus scanner scare popups. Compare this with iOS, where I need to be a certified Apple developer, need to sign my all my code, and can only distribute through the app store (and since it's only small graphics demos without real use, the gatekeepers would never let them through).

aroman• 11 years ago

Why does this sentiment always get downvoted? (Not just here on HN, but on other forums and in the real world as well)

Edit: to those downvoting me (classic), when I left this comment the parent was at -2 or -3 votes and at the bottom of the page.

sanxiyn• 11 years ago

While I fully support the development of alternatives to the web, I do not support that we should stop working on legacy technologies. Do you think people should have stopped working on gas lighting when electric lighting came along?

pcwalton5• 11 years ago

The choice isn't between "support HTML/CSS/JS" and "don't support HTML/CSS/JS". No Web browser can drop backwards compatibility. We haven't even been able to get rid of backwards compatibility for much worse things than CSS, such as <center>, because sites you need to use (such as Hacker News) won't update their markup to use CSS for layout.

asm.js is attractive because it is a small extension to the Web platform, so the overall additional complexity of an HTML/CSS/JS engine (which we are likely never going to be able to drop) doesn't go up much by implementing asm.js optimizations.

bobajeff• 11 years ago

By native code do you mean assembly language? That would be very insecure and CPU-specific.

bad_user2• 11 years ago

If you want to go native, then go native. If HTML/JS/CSS is a hack, then don't target the browser. It's that simple. Oh, you want to target the browser because it's ubiquitous? Well, that's because HTML/JS/CSS.

And on "emulating much better native platforms", well those native platforms are also trying (unsuccessfully) to emulate the web and the web is still winning.

flohofwoe5• 11 years ago

I would really love to see Native Client on Android as alternative to the dreaded Android NDK, and I really don't understand why this hasn't already happened, it's so incredibly obvious. Just give us the ability to deploy and run a PNaCl executable directly as normal Android application, and without all the Java and JNI shenanigans. The Pepper API has a lot more to offer than what's exposed through the NDK headers, and the SDK itself is much easier to get up and running then the NDK.

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'd like to see that, too. It might make supporting Go on Android easier, too. Even Rust could probably be used then for Android apps.

pjmlp• 11 years ago

I would just be happy if they offered the same as iOS and WP, access to OS APIs to all languages.

However I bet the Android team only added the NDK forced by upper management, given how little care they give to it.

tracker1• 11 years ago

Google has done a number of optimizations that enhance asm.js performance while not specifically targeting asm.js. This results in real time performance that sometimes beats Firefox, which has asm.js built in. While I would like to see more effort to the areas of asm.js that are slow, I can't discount the Chrome/v8 team's approach.

nnethercote• 11 years ago

But the Chrome/V8 teams is still benefiting from the existence of asm.js, because the subset of JS that people can use and expect good performance from is now well-defined. Prior to asm.js this kind of certainty wasn't available for either JS engine developers or JS authors.

bad_user2• 11 years ago

This results in real time performance that sometimes beats Firefox

While Chrome's results have been impressive, in my experience Firefox does much better for Asm.js code - at least for the games I've been playing. So what benchmarks have you seen?

Also, Google not getting involved in asm.js to make it better, but developing and promoting PNaCL and Dart, well that to me just smells like Microsoft's lock-in tactics with IExplorer in the nineties.

Siecje• 11 years ago

What does Google need to do to support asm.js? I thought asm.js is a subset of JavaScript so shouldn't it already be supported?

sp332• 11 years ago

It runs, but running in the normal JS engine is slow. If code validates as asm.js code, you can compile it with fewer checks and no garbage collection, so that it would run a lot faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js#Performance

Chrome already provides some speedup on asm.js code https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/03/asm-speedups-everywhere/

RussianCow• 11 years ago

By "support", I think the parent means "optimize". Chrome does not do the same kinds of optimizations for asm.js that Firefox does.

drawkbox• 11 years ago

asm.js support in Chrome was moved to "assigned" in February this year: https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2599

Looks to be the year of WebGL + asm.js across all browsers sometime this year. If so next year could be big for WebGL and web gaming again. And one day it could also make an impact on mobile but that seems to be moving ahead with things like Apple Metal and Khronos Vulkan (OpenGL successor - https://www.khronos.org/vulkan).

JoshTriplett4• 11 years ago

While I'd like to see asm.js implemented for compatibility, I greatly prefer native code over compiling to a JavaScript subset in the hopes of getting something vaguely resembling the original code back.

I understand why other browsers don't implement the Pepper API, because it's highly Chrome-specific; however, I'd like to see other browsers implementing the native-code sandbox, at least.

vesinisa2• 11 years ago

Asm.js has several benefits over NaCl. It's readily compatible with just about every browser in the market, and manufacturers just need to add some asm.js-specific optimizations to their JS runtime to fully unleash its execution power (but Chrome too already runs asm.js code very fast with just its generic JIT optimisations).

Secondly, it's based on a self-contained open source spec that constitutes a logical subset of another widely-supported open spec (ECMAScript) - no convoluted, versioned APIs coordinated by large, possibly competing and mutually incompatible engineering efforts. The asm.js spec is actually so simple it fits on a single web page: http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/

Yet it pretty much manages to achieve all that NaCl does by being also forwards-compatible with all the DOM-based extensions like HTML5 without needing any additional APIs (many asm.js demos for example bind to WebGL - this does not require any additional "asm.js API", as the browser's existing WebGL implementation suffices)

shmerl2• 11 years ago

So, will they add Opus support for audio tag too?

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

Speaking of which, wasn't Microsoft supposed to add WebRTC/ORTC support in its new browser, too? I don't think I've heard anything about it in the recent official announcements other than last year's rumors.

flohofwoe5• 11 years ago

WebAudio is in, and WebRTC/RTC seems to be in development: http://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/

mhuffman• 11 years ago

Microsoft has been on a real tear lately. I am very impressed with the directions they are taking.

Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge

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