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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

assembly is a pretty nasty language if one tries to write an entire program in it.

Agreed, but there are numerous alternatives that compile easily to assembly without ridiculous amounts of set up and prayer. We can program in C, C++, Python, Ruby, Java, any number other languages that will ultimately all be executed in the exact same fashion, barring some technical differences.

This does not exist for Javascript. You can jump through hoops to compile other code to Javascript and hope that it works and works acceptably, that's it.

Javascript isn't assembly, it's the only language and it's terrible.

Isn't this what asm.js attempts to provide? With mature tooling it should be possible to code in whichever language and compile or run on top of a VM which itself runs atop asm.js without having to worry about the underlying JS much at all (unless you want serious optimisation).

It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually come full circle and discard the DOM entirely. Each web application is just a giant <canvas> with QT or something compiled to JS providing the UI elements.

> It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually come full circle and discard the DOM entirely. Each web application is just a giant <canvas> with QT or something compiled to JS providing the UI elements.

The shocking thing is that we are almost at a point where a solution that sounds as stupid as that is actually less contrived and complex than the current mess.

From a non-expert, but avid observer, this looks like where things are going. I support Mozilla, but wonder if this is a Hail-Mary pass, with something like Dart and Web components being the 'engineered' approach.

At this stage, if asm.js is to succeed, they need to show how us mortals can use it. I.e. it needs to part of a complete toolchain, or an ide.

asm.js using qt (without hacks) would be amazing. How do I help (when I can hardly wrap my head around it)?

The web is a lousy platform for featureful applications. There's no amount of polishing that's going to shine that turd.

How so? That's how programs were written back in the day(and some still are, see for example Demoscene), which arguably were somewhat simpler than what we have these days(but that's more because of vast libraries than languages, imo).

The awesomeness of assembly language is that it's perfectly exact, deterministic and thus very predictable and efficient. No unnecessary indirection unless you build it yourself. No implicit type casting(infact, no types at all). Nothing. Just plain instructions with very specific semantics to build from.

Now how does JS(or even asm.js) fare with it's tons of indirection and ambiguous implicit typecasts compared to an actual assembly language? From a technical standpoint for a compile target the comparison is embarrassingly unfair, but hey, this is something which is supposedly "OK" and acceptable, right?

The ambiguity comes from the diversity and complexity of modern platforms, nobody would seriously consider using x64 assembler to write a modern application from the ground up.

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