Emscripten, given the recent advancements in Javascript interpreters, holds immense promise. There is a problem however: the size of the Javascript "executables".
As the size of their executables are already competitive with their C/C++ counterparts this is not easily fixed. CPython's "Javscript" runtime is 2.8 megabytes whilst CPython's C runtime is 2.2 megabytes, less than a 30% increase. With compression the JS size decreases, but not by enough.
A 2 megabyte JS file is likely prohibitively large. Even if common JS "executables" were hosted by Google, as is currently done for jQuery and other libraries, the problem is only mildly alleviated.
Emscripten is an amazing technical feat but I fear due to this it will see little usage. Their main focus currently is improving performance, but is anyone looking into decreasing the size or improving the handling of these "executables"?
As the size of their executables are already competitive with their C/C++ counterparts this is not easily fixed. CPython's "Javscript" runtime is 2.8 megabytes whilst CPython's C runtime is 2.2 megabytes, less than a 30% increase. With compression the JS size decreases, but not by enough.
A 2 megabyte JS file is likely prohibitively large. Even if common JS "executables" were hosted by Google, as is currently done for jQuery and other libraries, the problem is only mildly alleviated.
Emscripten is an amazing technical feat but I fear due to this it will see little usage. Their main focus currently is improving performance, but is anyone looking into decreasing the size or improving the handling of these "executables"?