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Re: [xsl] any plans to port Saxon CE to asm.js?

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We'll wait and see what tooling emerges. Saxon CE depends on GWT, and if GWT
starts supporting this target, or if some equivalent emerges that supports it,
then we can consider it.

It's good to see that someone is starting to think about a target language for
compiling browser applications that makes more sense in this role than
Javascript.

In principle if the Java VM written in LLVM is up to the job, then all we need
to do is compile Saxon-CE to a JAR file and run it using asm.js code to
execute the LLVM code which executes the Java bytecode. I fear that with three
levels of interpretation, any performance advantages might disappear quite
quickly, but who knows? Anyone want to try it? It's open source, after all.
There are also a few practicalities like providing a cut down version of the
OpenJDK class library that only contains the things Saxon CE actually needs -
this is something GWT does extremely well.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

On 9 Nov 2013, at 03:37, Lars Huttar <huttarl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Having read about the impressive performance gains for applications
> running on asm.js
> (http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/), I'm wondering
> whether there are any plans to port Saxon (CE) to that platform.
> 4-10x faster is a big deal!
> I don't know what tools are available from translating from Java or C#
> to LLVM (from which Emscripten will translate to asm.js). But I thought
> it was worth asking about.
>
> Lars

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