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This is pretty crazy impressive! The performance gain particularly. Is that much of a gain expected?

I'm impressed, but I'm not particularly surprised. The initial code was interpreted, while the new code is JIT compiled. I have no data to back this up, but I suspect that if instead of generating javascript, he generated x86 assembly, you'd see a similar speedup. Possibly a larger one.

That's exactly what Quake3 did natively, and it gave a large performance boost.

Right. Pulling from JC's August 16, 1999 .plan (http://floodyberry.com/carmack/johnc_plan_1999.html#d1999081...) when he first wrote the x86 compiler:

Q3demo1 dll: 52.9 Compiled: 50.2 Interpreted: 43.9

Q3demo2 dll: 50.1 Compiled: 46.5 Interpreted: 38.7

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