Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox

MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.

Comments

"new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.'"

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Asm.js is *not* a "new JavaScript version". Asm.js is to JavaScript what Squeak Slang is to Smalltalk, what Richard Kelsey's Pre-Scheme is to RxRS Scheme, and, more remotely, what RPython is to Python (although RPython is much richer in comparison with the other restricted languages, and really not all that JITtable - the translation process is very slow).

Re:I don't care

[wierd_w]

I've ued 64bit builds of nightly for some time now.

The issue is getting plugins to play nice.

You can't really blame Mozilla for not wanting to jump the shark, when they will catch all the flames for plugin makers who refuse to make their plugins 64bit friendly.

Right now, it's "whaaaaaa! I want 64bit builds!"

They offer a 64bit build, and then its "whaaaa! Flash plugin doesn't work! Noscript doesn't work! Adblock Plus doesn't work! Its horrible, and it crashes to boot!"

The market has to build up enough pressure to push out the colonic obstructions in the way of 64bit adoption as the new standard. It will take awhile.

Re:Not me

[Mr. McGibby]

That's fine. Plenty of people are doing it already. So nobody that matters really cares what you think.

Re:Remember the good old days?

[tibman]

"them" could be anyone, including you. Spinning up Apache is something any beginner developer can work through. Or even better, just pay 3$ a month for a place to host your stuff. Now you are one of "them". I understand your argument but it's like saying we shouldn't use wikipedia because they could nuke the website tomorrow to spite us. I don't want to go back to Encarta on a CD.