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:Remember the good old days?

[Pieroxy]

What happened to seeing a grid of 80x25 characters on a black background? Progress.

Re:Javascript engine evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the security concerns about WebGL are overblown. The code that runs on the GPU are vertex and fragment shaders. The shader language is very limited and exposes only a small surface between the host and the GPU. You can load/compile shader code, assign uniforms/attributes, share frame buffers and textures and that's about it. It's not as though the coder gets unfettered access to the entire DirectX stack.

Both firefox and chrome sanitize shader code so shaders can't play with whatever unsafe features some GPU might implement. One strength of WebGL (and OpenGL ES that's it's based on) is that the fixed function OpenGL API is gone; everything is done with shaders. That means the huge user-land fixed function API is gone and you're left with a simple API that just loads shader code and data (vectors, textures etc.) So the user-land attack surface is relatively small.

Vulnerabilities have been found in individual drivers but they've been few and fixed quickly. WebGL exploits are highly unlikely to be portable; they'll attack certain versions of GPU+drivers on certain OSs... broadly successful exploits won't be feasible.

Re:Javascript engine evolution

[buchner.johannes]

Ah, my mistake. "use asm" is a proposed Javascript feature:

... asm.js, a strict subset of JavaScript that can be used as a low-level, efficient target language for compilers. The asm.js language provides an abstraction similar to the C/C++ virtual machine: a large binary heap with efficient loads and stores, integer and floating-point arithmetic, first-order function definitions, and function pointers.

http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/
Also interesting:

You could write your programs in Asm.js, but the idea is that you will use other languages that compile to Asm.js. This opens up the possibility of converting existing desktop apps to run in the browser. Emscripten, for example, is a compiler that converts the LLVM bitcode intermediate language to either JavaScript or the asm.js subset.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/167-javascript/5694-firefox-runs-javascript-games-at-native-speed.html

Re:Not me

[Mr. McGibby]

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