Asm.js: The JavaScript Compile Target
This is the first I've heard of Portable Native Client (PNaCl), which sounds very interesting.<p>I think ASM is a great idea for "hacking", but the thing that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, is that you're usually only going to bother compiling to ASM for things which need the performance. The idea that they'll "still work" in non-optimized browsers doesn't seem too convincing -- games would probably be unplayable, and you'd see messages saying "This game only supports Firefox" etc.<p>And I don't see there being that many things written in C, etc., that one would want to port to the web, that <i>aren't</i> particularly processor-intensive.<p>Presumably PNaCl would be close to native code speed, a big improvement over ASM. And it seems like what's needed is cross-platform <i>fast</i> execution -- not backwards compatibility with JavaScript that will still run, but run much more slowly.<p>But nevertheless, it's super-interesting watching what's going on with ASM.