I guess it depends on the program, but for 99% of cases you should not have to. The very few times you would have to go for it, it's usually already part of some library you can use.

I'm not a fan of a future in which the only people that can do interesting things (including the use of SIMD intrinsics) are the platform vendors (eg, Mozilla), while the rest of us live in a JavaScript sandbox.

Maybe Mozilla should try writing their entire browser (VM included) in JavaScript/asm.js and let us know how that goes.

Large parts of the Firefox browser (as distinct from the Gecko+SpiderMonkey) are written in JS. Have a look at the code some time. Or, just open chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in Firefox to get a taste.

That's why I said "entire browser". Page rendering, font rendering, <canvas>, et al, are the interesting bits.

The use of XUL and the resulting UI clunkiness (speed, responsiveness, nativeness) are pretty well known.

A world in which only the vendor gets to write low-level code sounds is a terrible division of labor.

>I'm not a fan of a future in which the only people that can do interesting things (including the use of SIMD intrinsics) are the platform vendors (eg, Mozilla), while the rest of us live in a JavaScript sandbox.

What you describe as bleak is a much better future than what we have now. At least with Mozilla's proposal we will have a well defined low-level optimizable javascript "assembly", whereas now we just have Javascript itself.

We never had access to the use of SIMD intrinsics in browsers in the first place, anyway.

For that, use native.

> We never had access to the use of SIMD intrinsics in browsers in the first place, anyway. For that, use native.

Yes, exactly. I want it all: native performance, security, open platform.

Google is making attempts to tackle this, Mozilla keeps trying to shove app authors back into the JavaScript box.

>Yes, exactly. I want it all: native performance, security, open platform.

The problem is by trying to have "all" we might get less than what we have now.

NaCL for example is a horrible "standard", as far as specifications.

And if companies are allowed to build whole native closed source castles in the web browser, we might return to the era of Active X and Flash. Maybe not in the sense of less security (a common Active X issue), but surely in the sense of less interoperability, transparency and end user control.

You would basically just be running native apps in the browser. Why not do it in the desktop or mobile and let the internet be the open, not opaque, platform that it mostly is?