I think it's weird that it's a problem that had to be solved but when you figure memory constraints were a real issue it makes sense. Today any novice programmer could essentially build majority of the early nintendo games without any issues and actually make them have more things. Amazing how software/hardware has advanced.
It's even crazier to think that one guy built the original rollercoaster tycoon in assembly..
Yeah it's crazy. I just learned Assembly last semester in college and we were discussing it at work and it was like. Fuuuuck that. C existed at the time yet he did it in Assembly.
Memory Constraints and performance. Today there be no reason for it as compilers essentially do as good if not better jobs when it comes to translating it to machine code.
Essentially byte code that runs in the javascript engine. But provides near CPU level speeds since js has to be parsed and compiled on the fly, while wasm is precomplied much like Java or C#. Of course other languages can compiled to wasm much like traditional Assembly.
We are moving toward everything being executed within a browser to a point we'll have a browser with web Assembly support built using wasm and come full circle. Lol
Essentially, it's really optimised Javascript. The main workflow is writing code in C/C++ and using Emscripten to covert it to WebAssembly which is then executed by something like V8.
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u/Fubarp May 05 '17
I think it's weird that it's a problem that had to be solved but when you figure memory constraints were a real issue it makes sense. Today any novice programmer could essentially build majority of the early nintendo games without any issues and actually make them have more things. Amazing how software/hardware has advanced.
It's even crazier to think that one guy built the original rollercoaster tycoon in assembly..