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Comment by mraleph | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I agree with your point. Yet, I see quick edit&refresh as the part of the ecosystem. Hard to enable that without VM.

[regarding the disclaimer: I add it for two reasons. First, I have seen people accusing others of hiding their bias, so I prefer to state my affiliation explicitly. Second, if anybody wants to ask any Dart VM related questions and get response they know where to ask :-)]

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Sweet... so how does Dart compare with asms.js?

/me ducks

Serious answer:

The Dart2js compiler could easily take advantage of asm.js additions, and generate javascript code that uses asm.js. If asm.js does take off, all it can do is help Dart generate faster running code.

Now, if we are talking about the DartVM, asm.js could be used as an argument not to include the DartVM in other browsers. But asm.js is still very much in it's infancy, so we really need to wait and see how it's adopted and how it progresses.

Thanks, I agree with your comments. I was mostly just trying to poke the bear, though (http://mrale.ph/blog/2013/03/28/why-asmjs-bothers-me.html) :)

No it couldn't. asm.js has no garbage collector. The only way to get dart running on asm.js would be to port the entire VM to asm.js, which afiak won't work since the dart JIT emits machine code at runtime.

I don't think @kyrra was suggesting that Dart would compile completely to asm.js code, just parts where it makes sense (just like normal JavaScript uses asm.js only where it makes sense).

The DartVM has supported for typed arrays too, so it probably wouldn't be much work to hack emscripten to generate Dart source code.

It would be very interesting to see a benchmark of emscripten/SomethingMonkey/asm.js vs emscripten/DartVM.

(Could also add emscripten/dart2js/V8 for giggles)

I think there are incomparable. Dart is not a subset of JavaScript. Dart is dynamically typed. But Dart is more than just a language now, it's ecosystem of tools and libraries.

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