First 3D Commercial Web Game Powered By asm.js
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
The future is here, in 1/4 of the time I thought it would take. I guess I have to go write a new prediction.
So. . .here's my prediction, taking into account the pace
of hardware development and the history of software
development. In 20 years, cheap hardware will be
ridiculously fast, but it will still look very much like
Intel hardware today. We'll have many, many CPU cores to
work with, but nobody will use a parallel programming
language designed to take advantage of multiple cores.
Instead, virtualization (i.e. VMware, Xen) will be
integrated into the operating system, and each process
will run on its own virtual machine.
Each web browser will have been expanded into a full blown
widget toolkit and have merged in something that looks
like Flash, but there will still be multiple incompatible
browsers. The latest craze will be a browser compatibility
layer written in a programming language that compiles
to "raw Javascript", and it will reduce the performance of
applications but allow you to use them anywhere.
People will set about re-writing a version of Photoshop in
the new compatibility layer, and everyone will wonder why
they'd do that, when the current version of Photoshop runs
in Internet Explorer just fine.
I was sceptical but this shows that asm.js is a much better approach than Google's ActiveX wanna be solutions.
Yeah yeah I get it. I like asm.js as much as the next person; I just wish this whole PNaCl-is-ActiveX meme would seriously go away. It's willful ignorance.
FWIW, I think it's fantastic that asm.js is turning out great. I also think that PNaCl is a worthy technical achievement. Two ways of solving the same problem given different constraints. I think Mozilla has a better chance and agree with their reasoning re- browser compatibility and third-party adoption. Still doesn't mean I'm going to go around calling PNaCl ActiveX when it clearly isn't.
https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/pepperc/grou...
That said, I support using LLVM bitcode more than asm.js myself. I think asm.js is the dying breaths of JavaScript being hailed as its rebirth.
I think that may be a false dichotomy.
Not sure that's fair: https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/reference/pn...
But even if all of those things was true, that makes it ok to call it ActiveX? By that logic I can call Firefox IE because it implements extensions to JavaScript that have not (yet) been standardized. But that wouldn't be fair and neither is calling PNaCl ActiveX.
I think asm.js has technical advantages over LLVM bitcode. Neither were really designed for this purpose (for LLVM, you must strip the undefined behavior; for JS, you must strip the high-level semantics), but at least JS has a fully specified, multi-vendor standard specifying the execution semantics. Plus asm.js has a very minimal type system and is non-SSA (while retaining high-level loop constructs that can be easily used to construct SSA without dominance frontiers if needed), both of which I think are advantages for delivering bytecode over the Web.
{"success":false,"error":"DuplicateEntryException","message":"\u0027Anonymous1900\u0027 already exists."}
Un-be-lievable. I don't know who these Enterprisey IT managers are who are making these decisions but they seem to have a lot of power which they are using irresponsibly. And they seem to love IE.
A decade ago the large company I worked for switched to a web based timecard system. The only problem, ie only and the software team of 50+ all were using hpux or solaris workstations. No ie. Oh and they wanted timecards done daily.
The solution?
Set up 2 terminals in the lab with a unix backend and a windows NT virtual environment so we can use IE to do timecards.
quick google, this guy[0] got
IE10 = 11900,
chrome = 22500,
firefox = 40000
[0]http://www.beyondjava.net/blog/google-adds-asm-js-test-octan...
If IE is giving you half the performance of the nearest, free, easily downloaded competitor in your favourite online game, you might be tempted to switch. And this is for the few users that are on IE10!
So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome"
are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. We see
more of this fragmentation every day. As a user of Chrome
and Firefox (and Safari), I find it painful to experience,
never mind the political bad taste.
I actually like asm.js and think it's a totally reasonable approach. I mention this only to highlight that maybe all of the bad-faith assumptions Google gets are not entirely deserved. Objectively these two are similar moves and I think they are both in good faith.
I can't speak for Brendan, but I think his comment linked above was concerned that Dart and NaCl promote proprietary content types.
The Dart language is an interesting but incremental improvement like CoffeeScript and TypeScript. The Dart VM is a dead end because Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla will never embed Google's Dart VM. If Google merged Dartium's VM into Chrome, web servers would serve proprietary Dart content to Chrome and "separate but equal" JS content (generated from Dart) to other browsers. That approach would require extra tooling and testing from web developers and open the door to Google services serving exclusively Dart content. Imagine if YouTube only supported Chrome.
"proprietary" is unfair, and becomes more unfair all the time now that Dart is on its way to ECMA standardization: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57615494-92/google-convince...
If Dart is "proprietary," then so is asm.js, Mozilla Persona, Rust, and many other cool things that Mozilla is doing.
For example, take Persona. Mozilla invented, on its own, a new identity protocol which is not based on any existing standards and which it solely controls, released some code that implements it, and is trying to convince people to adopt it. When Google does the same kind of thing, it is called out as "proprietary."
> and open the door to Google services serving exclusively Dart content. Imagine if YouTube only supported Chrome.
This is exactly the kind of bad faith presumption that troubles me. Google is trying to push the web forward but in your mind their end game is to break its web properties for every browser except Chrome? This is so far from reality that I don't know how to respond to that, except to lament that distrust of Google by people associated with Mozilla is so high.
By "proprietary", I mean only executable by one client.
I had not read about Dart's ECMA standardization process (TC52). I think that's great news, but to be fair, that announcement was made just two days ago:
http://news.dartlang.org/2013/12/ecma-forms-tc52-for-dart-st...
> If Dart is "proprietary," then so is asm.js, Mozilla Persona, Rust, and many other cool things that Mozilla is doing.
I don't think asm.js, Rust, dart2js, or Go are "proprietary" because their implementations are open and their output can be executed by multiple platforms or clients. Dart source files is only executable by Google's Dart VM.
> This is exactly the kind of bad faith presumption that troubles me. Google is trying to push the web forward but in your mind their end game is to break its web properties for every browser except Chrome?
I do not think Google is plotting to create a walled garden (unlike Microsoft of the 1990s). But I think many people at Mozilla worry about future timelines where proprietary systems could be created, even if they are the inadvertent, cumulative result of different product teams' decisions.
Consider Google Hangouts. When Hangouts was launched in May of this year, it included an NPAPI plugin to support other browsers like Firefox. But now, only seven months later, the Hangouts service is very popular but is only accessible from as a Chrome extension. The Firefox NPAPI plugin is no longer supported or available for download.
Or consider Chrome's announcement to drop NPAPI itself. NPAPI is the source of much woe and instability for Firefox, but NPAPI is a de facto standard for browser-independent content. Pepper, the proposed replacement, is only implemented by Chrome. The only version of the Adobe Flash Player that uses Pepper is the Chrome port maintained by Google engineers. (Disclosure: I work at Mozilla and I used to work on Adobe's Flash Player team.) A co-worker at Mozilla told me that he asked a friend on the Chrome team "How much of the Pepper API does Chrome's Flash Player use?" and the half-joking response was "150%" because Chrome's Flash Player relied on Chrome internals that were not exposed in the Pepper API.
Or consider Google's 2011 promise to drop support for H.264 from Chrome. Google had the leverage with YouTube to migrate content and clients from H.264 to WebM, but that never happened. Even today, many YouTube videos are not encoded as WebM and content creators have a strong incentive to publish H.264 videos because Google Ads only support YouTube's Flash player.
Chrome does not run Dart natively.
With source maps Dart is debuggable from JS AFAIK. And dart.js allows deploying Dart content in a way that works seamlessly whether or not the Dart VM is present. I'm really not seeing the difference here.
Stay classy, Mozilla fans. I'm trying to be one of you but you're not making it easy.
Edit it seems pretty playable in firefox and chrome, don't notice much of a difference performance wise. Now please make a reverse case for PNaCL and pepper.js and we can all get really excited :)
New != Modern
1. Brings my browser to its knees (Firefox here)
2. Security. They seem to open themselves up to a whole lot of potential hacks (I hope their code deals with cookie jacking, csrf, sniffing, etc). While this would be a problem with closed source, this is made worse by running it in browser
3. Cheaters. How would they deal with people injecting code and creating bots?
3. The same way that companies currently cope with clients. It's not like client-hacking isn't so common-place that you have to design around it anyway.
3: Cheating has always been possible, in all games. The minified javascript source is still hard to grasp for a game that size.
Given that asm.js games tend to run at something like 15-30% of the speed of native code, I doubt we'll see Battlefield 4 or Starcraft 2 anytime soon. Additionally, given that the WoW game client is many gigabytes in size, I doubt we'll see that either, even if it could run.
So: Minecraft, yes. The rest? No.
But as they've had a team port (a trimmed version of) Minecraft to xbox live arcade, and the iPad, it would surprise me if they're not already working on a *.js version.
This is from a link in the article for more information. These Monster Madness fellows found Firefox gave them 33% of native performance, and Chrome 20%. Presumably IE would give you fractions of these figures.
I figured that, rather than citing figures from benchmarks, I'd go for the real world scenario that this release has given us.
WebGL + asm.js on desktop computers should be roughly equivalent to native iOS / Android applications on top-of-the-line mobile devices (with possibility to get better effects on desktop GPUs).
This is btw what's going on with these very fast Emscripten ports - they can be done so quickly because the bulk of the hardest work was already done before, when engine and game developers made their code and maybe even more importantly their assets work well on mobile devices.
If you noticed many of these fast Emscripten ports were not desktop ports but had already existing mobile versions before - Unreal Engine Citadel demo, Unigine Crypt demo, and now Monster Madness.
Nevertheless it's still very impressive, big kudos to Mozilla folks.
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[1] For example these iOS 3d games should be feasible on the web (runtime performance wise, big asset downloads may be pain): The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Grand Theft Auto 3 / Vice City, Infinity Blade series, Max Payne 1, Mirror's Edge, XCom: Enemy Unknown, Real Racing, Asphalt series, mobile Need for Speed series, etc.
Plus of course anything 2D - Angry Birds, World of Goo, Plants vs Zombies, Osmos, Limbo, etc.
Can they put a CORS configuration up? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/cors.html#how... and http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/UG/EditingBucketP...
The problem is that video fails to explicitly point out that the only version relying on asm.js is the browser version, which is the least interesting, while they're all excited about different devices those are all supported thanks to Unreal's cross platform support and has nothing to do with the asm.js version.
Otherwise they can stick to javascript.
(And, of course, anything else that compiles to javascript)
CUSTOMERS want ultra high performances, especially on mobile. Therefore businesses will have to deliver these performances.
Trust me, in a few years , getting a good client-side gig will mean knowing C/C++ .
The limitation today is the size of the "js" code produced, which is way too heavy.
This doesn't give anything to web developers. It gives C / C++ developers a way onto the web.
That's not fair at all, because there are valid answers to that question like "Because I also want my programs to run in the browser."
Many developers choose the web because there is their audience, their business, their future. And we know that people don't like to install stuffs, they want to consume a product LIVE.