Re:From Asm.js to WebAssembly
by AriaMinaei on Friday June 19, 2015 @06:32AM
(#9743914)
Well, gzip is general purpose. A binary format would be aware of JS' semantics and possibly yield much higher compression rates.
In fact, WASM's binary format is intended to be that way and apparently is yields more compression than using only gzip: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/BinaryEnco...
We already have gzip, although even with gzip minifying is useful, because gzip isn't content-aware. You can also enable source maps in production if you care about openness. The client doesn't have to fetch the maps/sources until developer tools is opened.