> WebAssembly's big strength over asm.js is it has smaller executables
It's not about the "smallness" as measured in the number of bytes, the minimized (that is, short variable names, no comments and whitespaces) asm.js code with the "bracket-fest" can actually be quite compact.
It is about the form which does save some lexing, parsing, searching and allocation steps in the run-time. Which matters when the code is measured in megabytes and the goal is to run it as soon as possible and save as much battery as possible on the mobile devices. From the FAQ:
"The kind of binary format being considered for WebAssembly can be natively decoded much faster than JavaScript can be parsed (experiments show more than 20× faster). On mobile, large compiled codes can easily take 20–40 seconds just to parse, so native decoding" "is critical to providing a good cold-load user experience."
It's not about the "smallness" as measured in the number of bytes, the minimized (that is, short variable names, no comments and whitespaces) asm.js code with the "bracket-fest" can actually be quite compact.
It is about the form which does save some lexing, parsing, searching and allocation steps in the run-time. Which matters when the code is measured in megabytes and the goal is to run it as soon as possible and save as much battery as possible on the mobile devices. From the FAQ:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#why...
"The kind of binary format being considered for WebAssembly can be natively decoded much faster than JavaScript can be parsed (experiments show more than 20× faster). On mobile, large compiled codes can easily take 20–40 seconds just to parse, so native decoding" "is critical to providing a good cold-load user experience."