ARM's not working with them, but the JS-SIMD standards are being developed such that pretty much and SIMD unit will work with little to no work. Instead of making the commands 256 bits wide like current Intel SIMD ops, they're using 128 bits, which will work with ARM's neon as well with no problem.
SIMD makes JS a better compile target. The Dart VM is still more "lightweight" (it has to generate a lot less native code) and it offers much faster startup (10x). There also aren't deoptimization traps scattered all over the place. The performance is very predictable.
As far as the VM itself is concerned, it doesn't really matter if other browser start to support Dart natively. The VM is extremely useful for development, you can embed it in native applications, and you can use it to write web servers and other command line tools.
Startup compared to v8. v8 compiles all JS to bytecode first, which is where it gets poorer startup time compared to SpiderMonkey's interpreter, or JavaScriptCore's handwritten assembly interpreter.
How many people are using the Dart VM outside of Dartium? Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?
It's not like SpiderMonkey starts up instantaneously. Also, an interpreter is of course slower than the quick and dirty native code generated by V8.
JSC doesn't seem to have an advantage in the extremely short-running SunSpider benchmark suite.
Dart's snapshots are also something you just can't do with JavaScript, because the program structure is created imperatively with JS. You have to run quite a bit of code before you can actually run the program itself.
> Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?
Worried about what? Why would you care anyways? Do you also get worried if some game uses a Lua VM?
I use Dart for pretty much everything. Command line tools, web servers, and client-side scripting. It's an excellent choice for the things I do and the things I want to do.
It's a better fit than Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, or PHP. I still do use those languages occasionally, but Dart is my primary language now.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread[1]: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/simd/#implementation-statu...
Here's hoping they wind up doing this for "JavaScript Shared Memory, Atomics, and Locks" (aka Pthreads)
Also a legacy language people are forced to use.
As far as the VM itself is concerned, it doesn't really matter if other browser start to support Dart natively. The VM is extremely useful for development, you can embed it in native applications, and you can use it to write web servers and other command line tools.
How many people are using the Dart VM outside of Dartium? Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?
JSC doesn't seem to have an advantage in the extremely short-running SunSpider benchmark suite.
Dart's snapshots are also something you just can't do with JavaScript, because the program structure is created imperatively with JS. You have to run quite a bit of code before you can actually run the program itself.
> Is it a meaningful amount that I should be worried?
Worried about what? Why would you care anyways? Do you also get worried if some game uses a Lua VM?
I use Dart for pretty much everything. Command line tools, web servers, and client-side scripting. It's an excellent choice for the things I do and the things I want to do.
It's a better fit than Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, or PHP. I still do use those languages occasionally, but Dart is my primary language now.