Asm.js in Firefox Nightly

Re:Asm.js in Firefox Nightly by ux-app on Thursday March 21, 2013 @10:09PM (#5420929)

If I'm understanding things correctly, the JS produced is a subset of ES3. The use of typed arrays simply give supporting platforms an additional speed boost.

According to Brendan Eich: "all of JS (ES3) is 'universally supported' [by asmjs]"

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Re:Asm.js in Firefox Nightly by surrealize on Friday March 22, 2013 @12:15AM (#5421341)

I'm reading Eich's tweet differently. Here's the twitter exchange:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/302897797827530752

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Alias Cummins ‏@no_other_alias

@BrendanEich So would I be right in thinking that the point of asm.js is to tie together all the universally supported bits of JS?

BrendanEich @BrendanEich

@no_other_alias No, all of JS (ES3) is "universally supported". http://asmjs.org/ is a no-GC-pause well-typed compiler target language.

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@no_other_alias is asking if asm.js is about formalizing a JS subset that's universally supported (in all browsers). Eich says no, all of JS (ES3) is universally supported (so no subsetting is required for cross-browser compabitility). Asm.js is about formalizing a JS subset that can be compiled to much faster machine code.

So I don't think Eich is making a claim about asm.js backward-compatibility here.

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