Intel extends JavaScript for parallel programming Intel is developing an extended version of JavaScript that brings parallel programming to web applications. Codenamed River Trail, the project was revealed this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and the company has open sourced an early version of the technology in the form of a Firefox add-on. For the most …
'River Trail' provides things like ParallelArray which has a method that can execute a user-given function in data-parallel (ie: running the function for each element in the ParallelArray, passing the function the index in the ParallelArray as well as any other params that the user initially passed through). So effectively SIMD and quite a bit like invoking on GPU kernels in OpenCL - in fact, Intel even says something to this effect.
Still, it doesn't make me look forward to coding in parallel under JavaScript any more than threads would do. But then Google's Native Client isn't any more innovative either - just different problems, but headaches nonetheless. I wonder if we are witnessing the beginnings of the fracturing of Web programming?
"I wonder if we are witnessing the beginnings of the fracturing of Web programming?"
There have always been several competing 'standards' - take flash/activeX, I dont see googles native client as being any different, however this from intel if it gets implemented by the js standards body will be implemented by all browsers eventually and is a step forward allowing javascript to keep up with other technologies, thereby preventing fracturing web programming keeping everyone on HTML/Javascript
You're confusing open-source and standards? Just because they opened the source code it doesn't make them any better than Google's Dart project. For me, for now, it's just another browser-based technology. In the future, if it becomes a standard, then we'll see. Also, more things would stop it from becoming a standard, it must be measured how much good it'd be for the Web and if it wouldn't favor Intel chips, and we don't have that information.
It is OpenCL specific.
So while it is not x86 specific, it apllies only to vector problems - stuff that can be parallelised using OpenCL. While there is a host of problems which fall into that category - image transform, video transform, etc they are only a small fraction of what can be made faster through parallelisation. It will do nothing with regards to accelerating "classic" software. For that you need threads (or something similar).
"At IDF, Intel showed off a physics simulation built with River Trail and WebGL, and on an eight-core machine, it ran about fifteen times faster than a serial version written with standard JavaScript."
Meanwhile a C++ version would probably run 100 times faster.
Sorry , horses for courses. Javascript should stick to what its good at , not try and convert it into some general purpose graphics language. If you want high performance graphics you won't be wanting to do it via an interpreted language in a piece of bloatware known as a browser.
and there's no technical reason why JavaScript should not be calling that version and achieving the same acceleration where that is available on a machine or just running the slow js code where it is not.
There may however be phantom technical problems raised in Standards Committees by certain parties to prevent you using your computer to its max from the browser.
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