Yep TextAdept never really got mush visibility, but it was (is?) a great approach to a having a editor fully scripted in lua, much more so than Scite which also has lua scripting and of course is uses the same scintilla text editor component as TextAdept.
These days Adobes Brackets is using pretty much the same approach in the JS side of things.
Could you please justify your claim that "it's not exactly honest to frame it as "just JavaScript."" ?
The fact is that asm.js runs and as of recently, does so performantly in Chrome which does even implement the aot optimisations in odinmonkey.
To my mind given the above fact it seems perfectly reasonable to make the assertion that asm.js is just javascript.
Sure, thats why all those NaCL based apps in the chrome store work so well on my ARM based chromebook.
Perhaps this is the path you weren't seeing:
http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/03/20/para...
The reason people "write native iOS games" is that today, it the shortest and easiest path between them and $$$.
But that is changing and may still be true tomorrow but maybe not next year.
I'd say smart http is more than enough, especially since Github for example is pushing it as the preferred protocol for most users: https://github.com/blog/1104-credential-caching-for-wrist-fr...
The main issue is that Github do not have CORS support for http access to repos (though they do support CORS for access to repos via their proprietary API) and I don't think the other big public hosters like Bitbucket or Google Code support CORS either.
On the subject of big pack files, sure you'd want to stream them to storage instead of trying to store in memory (for instance JGit has this as an option) but I agree Tim that to start with, even supporting small-medium size repos would be a huge win.