Emscripten 1.3!

Version 1.3 of Emscripten, the open source LLVM to JavaScript compiler, has been released.

No new demo this time, sorry. However the Python demo has been updated to improve performance and enable raw_input to work (it prompts for input using window.prompt). Press 'execute' in the demo to see it work.

Main updates:

• Support for a new usage of typed arrays, TA2. In TA2, a single shared buffer is used, and int8, int32 etc. are all accessed through views into that buffer. The main benefit here is memory usage - this mode takes much less memory than TA1 (the original typed array usage), and in most cases probably less than the non-typed array case.
  
  In theory, this can also be faster. However that doesn't appear to be the case in my benchmarks, due to the need to divide pointers by 2 or 4 constantly (pointers are raw addresses, while indexes into typed arrays take into account the size of the element. int32vec[1] is at address 4!), and since JS engines still do not heavily optimize typed arrays.
  
  One thing you can do, though, is use dangerous nonportable LLVM optimizations with TA2. TA2 lets you write an int and read the first character, and get the 'right' result. Of course 'right' will depend on the endianness, so this is very dangerous and not recommended. However you can compile two versions, one for each endianness. This can potentially be faster.
  
  
• Some relooper optimizations were done, which gave us a nice speed improvement. I'll probably do a full blogpost on performance issues, but to briefly summarize, we seem to be getting close to the speed of handwritten JS code, which is to say, as fast as we can probably get. In absolute terms, compared to gcc -O3 (the fastest native code), we are around 5X slower (on the latest development versions of SpiderMonkey and V8). But there is a big spread: In raw numeric processing we are often just 2-3X slower, which is about the same as Scala, Haskell, and Mono, but certain other operations are costlier and in some benchmarks we are up to 10X slower.

Other news:

• Still hoping for people to help out with OpenGL/WebGL stuff. Please step up! I don't know what to do there myself.
  
• Next main project for me personally will probably be better tools to integrate compiled code with normal JS code. One option is to use SWIG to generate bindings. We could then compile a C++ library and use it in a natural way on the web, which would be very cool. If you know SWIG, or don't but want to see this happen (like me ;) then please get in touch.
  
• I had some discussions with people interested in compiling certain large projects to the web, for example Second Life and Mono. Both have significant technical difficulties (rendering and networking for Second Life, the non-existence of an interpreter and the limitations of mono-llvm in Mono), but if the people interested in each are serious enough to do the work to overcome the respective difficulties, I have promised to do the raw C++ to JS conversion for each of those projects. Hopefully cool things will happen here.