Yep TextAdept never really got mush visibility, but it was (is?) a great approach to a having a editor fully scripted in lua, much more so than Scite which also has lua scripting and of course is uses the same scintilla text editor component as TextAdept.

These days Adobes Brackets is using pretty much the same approach in the JS side of things.

Could you please justify your claim that "it's not exactly honest to frame it as "just JavaScript."" ?

The fact is that asm.js runs and as of recently, does so performantly in Chrome which does even implement the aot optimisations in odinmonkey.

To my mind given the above fact it seems perfectly reasonable to make the assertion that asm.js is just javascript.

It's an IR that currently is compatible with JS, but that's not necessarily the case longterm. And I personally don't see how it can retain that property while adding some of the things the platform needs (e.g. thread support that works for existing codebases). I asked dherman this elsewhere in the thread, and it seems like diverging from JS hasn't been ruled out. https://hackernews.hn/item?id=6023902

So, my concern here is that asm.js will either be forced to diverge from JS to make it generally useful, or it will need to add APIs to JS that are not appropriate outside of asm.js. If it gets to that place, then I feel that the compromises necessary for asm.js were a waste, and it would have clearly been better to just introduce a new IR that wasn't bound by the constraints of asm.js.

Sure, thats why all those NaCL based apps in the chrome store work so well on my ARM based chromebook.

Perhaps this is the path you weren't seeing:

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/03/20/para...

I already mentioned RiverTrail stuff in another response. I don't really think it is a replacement for SSE/AVX/NEON/AltiVec.

Agreed. So we are getting together with John McCutchan who did Dart SIMD intrinsics to do same for JS via Ecma TC39 Harmony process and rapid prototyping in SpiderMonkey -- and I hope in V8 as well.

/be

+1 to adding the SIMD Dart types into JS. This is how I like to see Google and Mozilla working together to improve the web. (WebRTC is another fabulous cooperation)

The reason people "write native iOS games" is that today, it the shortest and easiest path between them and $$$.

But that is changing and may still be true tomorrow but maybe not next year.

I'd say smart http is more than enough, especially since Github for example is pushing it as the preferred protocol for most users: https://github.com/blog/1104-credential-caching-for-wrist-fr...

The main issue is that Github do not have CORS support for http access to repos (though they do support CORS for access to repos via their proprietary API) and I don't think the other big public hosters like Bitbucket or Google Code support CORS either.

On the subject of big pack files, sure you'd want to stream them to storage instead of trying to store in memory (for instance JGit has this as an option) but I agree Tim that to start with, even supporting small-medium size repos would be a huge win.