Gamasutra and Ars Technica posts on WebGL and JavaScript performance

From a post on Gamasutra by Jasmine Kent about 3D rendering in the browser using WebGL (found here), I ended up on a post on Ars Technica by Peter Bright claiming Mozilla's ability to produce near native performance using JavaScript (found here).

An excerpt from the Gamasutra article:

"WebGL is OpenGL for the browser, providing access to the power of the GPU, but with some constraints. Importantly, CPU-side data processing with JavaScript is slower than in a native app. Transferring data to the GPU involves more security checks than in a native app, to keep Web users safe. However, once the data is on the GPU, drawing with it is fast."

An excerpt from the Ars Technica article:

"The fact that asm.js doesn't look like JavaScript any human would produce might seem like a problem. Scant few developers of native code programs use assembler, and asm.js is even more feature-deprived than most real assembly languages. Mozilla doesn't really intend for developers to write asm.js programs directly, however. Instead, the idea is that compilers use asm.js as the target, with programs themselves written in some other language.

That language is typically C or C++, and the compiler used to produce asm.js programs is another Mozilla project: Emscripten. Emscripten is a compiler based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Clang C/C++ front-end. The Clang compiler reads C and C++ source code and produces an intermediate platform-independent assembler-like output called LLVM Intermediate Representation. LLVM optimizes the LLVM IR. LLVM IR is then fed into a backend code generator—the part that actually produces executable code. Traditionally, this code generator would emit x86 code. With Emscripten, it's used to produce JavaScript."

I'd only come across WebGL in passing, and I had never heard of asm.js, nor of the ability to compile C/C++ to JavaScript. 3D rending and native performance, all in the browser? Awesome-o-meter set to maximum indeed if this stuff works as intended.

Comments

Popular Posts