Interesting Links for 27-03-2013

• How the US Postal Service discriminates against atheism
  (tags: mail atheism usa )
• Hundreds of young people have received anti-radicalisation support
  (tags: terrorism uk )
• Changing culture is a long term project
  (tags: society libdem feminism lgbt culture )
• An update on when the various bits of tram-related road closures in Edinburgh will reopen.
  (tags: trams edinburgh )
• How Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage Is Changing, and What It Means (2%/year in favour)
  (tags: marriage usa lgbt )
• Women make better decisions than men
  (tags: decisions gender business )
• Julie Burchill is entitled to offend transsexuals, press watchdog rules
  (tags: uk newspapers media lgbt )
• Secure Boot and Restricted Boot - if you own technology, it should be yours to control.
  (tags: technology android apple security microsoft )
• Absolutely gorgeous dragon dresses
  (tags: clothing dragons )
• Some advice to the parent of a soon-to-be-teenage girl
  (tags: teenagers advice parenting )
• 21 graphs that show America’s health-care prices are ludicrous
  (tags: money usa healthcare )

The web just got a thousand times more exciting.

A few days ago Mozilla announced that the Nightly version of Firefox now supports asm.js.

asm.js is a very small part of javascript that can be incredibly highly optimised (if your browser supports it), so that it runs much, much faster than normal Javascript.

How much faster? About half the speed of C.


Now, nobody in their right mind is going to _write_ in asm.js. It's not very human readable, or writeable. You write your code in other languages and then it compiles to asm.js. Which means that you can write in anything which has a compiler that produces it (so far, just emscripten, which converts LLVM output), and get something which runs inside a browser, with no plugins. So far, only Firefox supports this level of optimisation, but I'm hopeful that Chrome will join it. And even if it doesn't, the code will _still run_ in Chrome. It just won't be as blindingly fast.

What makes this particularly exciting is that today Mozilla announced that, over the last four days, Epic ported the Unreal Engine to asm.js. Four days, to port over an amazing 3d engine, and have this running in your web page:

And, one assumes, they're still optimising. I doubt they'll ever make it quite as fast as C. But I'm sure they can get faster.

And then we have a standard way of getting real applications running on any computer that can run a browser, no matter what operating system it's running on. This really does feel like a step change to me.