Re:A look at asm.js and the future with WebAssembly
by azakai on Saturday January 16, 2016 @11:32AM
(#10915691)
To be fair, asm.js already has significant progress towards shared-memory threads [1]. That will finish standardization and ship long before wasm has threads.
I would say that the main difference between asm.js and wasm is, as you mentioned, that wasm is a binary format. That will allow far smaller downloads, and far faster startup times.
The second main difference is that wasm is a new formal standard, with all vendors involved, so we should see consistent performance across browsers. Unlike asm.js which was a pure JavaScript optimization, so different browsers optimized in different ways, leading to large variability (which decreased over time, but remained significant, e.g. on specific things like memory growth, which was abandoned due to that).
[1] http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/pthrea...
Threading and being a binary format instead of a text one aren't differences as fundamental as the difference between the Web APIs and NaCl's Pepper. Many of the complaints, as you point out, are about the Web APIs, and unlike NaCl Web Assembly is fully committed to the Web APIs (as it should be).