Native Speed on the Web - JavaScript and asm.js
Explore the advancements in JavaScript performance and the development of asm.js in this 30-minute conference talk from Strange Loop 2013. Discover how compiling code from languages like C++ to JavaScript, coupled with browser optimizations, has brought web applications closer to native speed while maintaining backwards compatibility. Learn about the asm.js approach, its real-world applications through demos, current limitations, and potential future directions. Compare this method to other proposals for enhancing web performance. Gain insights from Alon Zakai, a Mozilla researcher and founder of the Emscripten open source project, which aims to automatically port existing codebases to standard web technologies using LLVM to compile C and C++ to JavaScript.