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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

> And all you get is 5.4M / 4K of unreadable bytecode.

It's just gzipped. ungzip the files (turns 5 MB into 50 MB) and you can read them as plain text javascript.

Yes and no... once you hit the

   // EMSCRIPTEN_START_ASM

it becomes

    if((d|0)!=36620|(d|0)!=0&(c[b+4>>2]|0)!=0)
    {c[1779323]=6}b=c[1312365]|0;d=7084512;
    c[d>>2]=c[1312364]|0;c[d+4>>2]=b;b=7084520;
    d=c[b>>2]|0;if((d|0)!=36620|(d|0)!=0&(c[b+4>>2]|0)!=0)
    {c[1779323]=7}b=c[1312363]|0;d=7084520;
    c[d>>2]=c[1312362]|0;

all on one line for nearly the rest of the file. It might as well be bytecode. Actually many bytecodes are more understandable.

No, it's still JavaScript. The fact that it's compressed or not human-readable doesn't make it bytecode.

"It might as well be bytecode."

So can you add some dynamic code into asm.js and expect same performance? Asm.js is an assembly that looks like JavaScript for compatibility and readability.

No, asm.js code that parses successfully is compiled ahead of time. It is a strict subset of the JavaScript programming language. If you use parts other than the subset, it will fail to parse as valid asm.js code and revert to the interpreter/JITs.

THERE is the code. LOL, I actually did not spot it in the file and asked myself "just where the ... is the code"?

Well yes, but the same is true of any minified JavaScript, handwritten or compiled. For example look at the output of the closure compiler minifier.

Minified Javascript does not operate on an enormous buffer of bytes, such that you get seven and eight digit numbers flying everywhere. It's still easier to understand and manipulate than ASM.

asm.js isn't just an evocative name, it's a reasonable description... it's assembly in Javascript.

Ah, that helps. I wonder why the gzip is not done automatically by curl/wget...

Yeah, it confused me at first as well, but I ran `file` to see what was going on and that clued me in.

It will if you pass in --compressed flag, e.g.:

   curl --compressed "http://cdn.unrealengine.com/html5-4c0913f/UDKGame_Data.js" -H "Referer: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/" -O

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