Funny story, in 2013 I was working for the Google Earth team. A new clean slate version of Google Earth was in the works (which has been released since) and this was at the time that wonderful demos were being made with asm.js
I convinced one of the engineers to try compiling it in emscripten. It was a total success, running at 45 fps. The middle manager got so excited about this that he decided to make a full push for this version of google earth to be used since
it was truly cross platform product running in the browser at near native speed.
The portable Native client / webassembly team caught wind that this was happening and convinced management to kill the project. The middle manager who was overly excited about this technology, was also let go.
All this to make way for web assembly which was “right around the corner” but actually wasn’t (back in 2013). Today web assembly is essentially doing the same thing that asm.js was doing 8 years ago.
If Google had not messed up this decision it would
have really been a trailblazer for other companies to
follow suit.
Lol! The funny thing is that at that point, the code you were shipping was "just javascript" but in a machine generated format. When places go out of their way to tell you about their engineering culture, they often aren't.
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Funny story, in 2013 I was working for the Google Earth team. A new clean slate version of Google Earth was in the works (which has been released since) and this was at the time that wonderful demos were being made with asm.js
I convinced one of the engineers to try compiling it in emscripten. It was a total success, running at 45 fps. The middle manager got so excited about this that he decided to make a full push for this version of google earth to be used since it was truly cross platform product running in the browser at near native speed.
The portable Native client / webassembly team caught wind that this was happening and convinced management to kill the project. The middle manager who was overly excited about this technology, was also let go.
All this to make way for web assembly which was “right around the corner” but actually wasn’t (back in 2013). Today web assembly is essentially doing the same thing that asm.js was doing 8 years ago.
If Google had not messed up this decision it would have really been a trailblazer for other companies to follow suit.
Lol! The funny thing is that at that point, the code you were shipping was "just javascript" but in a machine generated format. When places go out of their way to tell you about their engineering culture, they often aren't.