Re:Yesterday I Wrote My First Firefox OS App
by pcwalton on Monday August 12, 2013 @11:03PM
(#6203779)
> Many developers working in the area of games or video and graphics decoding/encoding needs access to native-level instruction sets to get maximum performance.
SIMD work for asm.js is actively underway.
> Nevermind that I have no desire to attempt to debug my emscripten-translated C/C++ application instead of just debugging the original source.
Source maps are designed to solve this problem.
> There's an entire ecosystem around supporting native apps in terms of tooling, debugging, libraries, etc. and FireFox OS seems to ignore all of that.
For tooling, Emscripten offers very close analogues to the native toolchain—you invoke emcc. Since what you write is C, you can use all the static analysis tools, such as clang's static analysis framework, that you're used to. Debugging is currently more difficult, it is true. For libraries, just compile them along with your app with Emscripten.
SIMD work for asm.js is actively underway.
> Nevermind that I have no desire to attempt to debug my emscripten-translated C/C++ application instead of just debugging the original source.
Source maps are designed to solve this problem.
> There's an entire ecosystem around supporting native apps in terms of tooling, debugging, libraries, etc. and FireFox OS seems to ignore all of that.
For tooling, Emscripten offers very close analogues to the native toolchain—you invoke emcc. Since what you write is C, you can use all the static analysis tools, such as clang's static analysis framework, that you're used to. Debugging is currently more difficult, it is true. For libraries, just compile them along with your app with Emscripten.