[fpc-pascal] WebAssembly Target

[Reimar Grabowski]

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.

R.