James Cat Posted July 25, 2013 Share Posted July 25, 2013 Hi Is anyone on here involved with emscripten or using emscripten? I was hoping to compile some of my core engine stuff to asm.js. I found it very troublesome to install on ubunto 12.10, even with various step by step guides, and it still only partially works (the node stuff works but the canvas stuff doesn't). There doesn't seem to be much of an active user community around it, with questions on the issues forum on github unanswered for days. I sort of thought it was Mozilla's dream JS developer tool for the future, but it doesn't seem like there's that much going on with it...? James Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Cat Posted July 25, 2013 Author Share Posted July 25, 2013 uh sorry for the misspelling of emscripten! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Cat Posted July 30, 2013 Author Share Posted July 30, 2013 I take it back, after a short delay the support came and was very good :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dazld Posted August 5, 2013 Share Posted August 5, 2013 It seems that this for now will be very much a mozilla only effort - there is a bug open on chrome's tracker to implement 'use asm' but doesn't seem to be very active. The tech itself is super interesting, but the argument that having various 'use xxx' directives littered around your code leads to mighty confusion also makes sense. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Cat Posted August 5, 2013 Author Share Posted August 5, 2013 I think it's a trade-off, the AOT compiler can only know which parts are safe to do AOT compilation on if it's told, I suppose they could risk having the AOT compilation fail and revert to the JIT route if that happens, but that seems like it would slow things down, for backwards compatability reasons using an unassigned string literal is a fair choice - I think the problem is like when you have C/C++ source code for different platforms, it is full of nasty pre-processor directives which pollute the meaning of the source code and make it hard to follow. I did get it to work but it's very hard to figure out what will and wont be easy to port, for games the idea is that anything that worked with SDL can quite quickly be ported but some stuff I tried even in the test files didn't seem to work 100% reliably, also the javascript it makes looks horrendous. There's a project to try and get lljs to compile to asm.js which might be a bit easier for javascript programmers to get the benefits of asm.js, and I read that a typescript -> asm.js compiler is also a possibility, I think I'd prefer either of them, I think C/C++ have their good points but I think they don't map to the event based browser environment very well, so it's hard to imagine writing web apps/games using them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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