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Re:From Asm.js to WebAssembly by Yaggo on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:47AM (#9736888)
> if someone invented a binary format for JS that was interchangeable with the current text format

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.

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...