Comment by pseudosavant
2 days ago
It is amazing to see what is happening with wasm/wasi lately and that is all grew out of asm.js.
asm.js, like JSON, is a strict subset of the JavaScript grammar that turned out to be very useful in a certain way. Obviously, a text encoding like asm.js wasn't an efficient way to distribute a bytecode, but it proved enough to make wasm the obvious next step.
Everyone keeps forgetting NaCL and PNaCL predates it, and asm.js only exists because Mozilla didn't want to adopt it.
And this was the one time Mozilla was right ;)
Somewhat dubious claim if it was right or not, the only benefit was that asm.js was backwards compatible and set the stage for Mozilla to lose out by simply having the slower JS engine whereas NaCL/PNaCL proposal was "performance neutral" between browsers.
For what, Firefox is for all practical purposes irrelevant in a Chrome dominated Web, Google can steer WebAssembly into whatever direction fits Chrome.
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