[fpc-pascal] WebAssembly Target

[noreply at z505.com]

On 2017-03-17 09:57, Reimar Grabowski wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Mar 2017 11:14:17 +0000
> Graeme Geldenhuys <mailinglists at geldenhuys.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> And I am pleasantly surprised! :)  That demo worked perfectly on my
>> system. Sound, animation, graphics all silky smooth. Impressive 
>> indeed.
> 
> If running a 3 year old iOS Demo in a browser when we have seen Unreal
> Tournament 3 being playable there 4 years ago is impressive is
> debatable.
> For me the impressive thing is that FireFox with WebAssembly manages
> to show the same performance as Chrome without it. Having them run
> side by side both fullscreen I can see no performance difference at
> all.
> Perhaps the JS side is doing so little that it hardly matters (as it
> should be, when doing WebGL you want to do as much on the GPU as
> possible).
> First benchmarks indicate that there isn't much of a performance
> increase with the current WebAssembly implementation over pure JS
> anyway.
> The benefit is that you can 'run C code' in the browser and that's 
> currently it.
> Having a WebAssembly target for FPC would surely be nice (more
> options) but hardly a game changer currently.
> In my little experience with WebGL the JS performance was never that
> big of a problem but getting lots of data into the browser without the
> transfer being super slow or the browser consuming alot more memory
> than it should.
> 

Why run webgl through javascript if you could just make something like a 
flash plugin object (like youtube videos) that plays opengl scenes using 
some native format similar to how flash uses SWF files, or whatever?

I think there was some opengl plugin object, but can't remember...

It seems like almost the web browser is trying to become Emacs, 
everything and the kitchen sink, though...

If it includes opengl or webgl, and video players, and.. everything 
under the sun.. it makes me wonder whether we should really not be going 
back to exe's again... I.e. if you want to download a opengl 
application, you just download an exe/elf program instead of running it 
in the web browser ;-)

Still, web browser (abuse syndrome) apps are cool.