Qconn

Combining JavaScript with Other Languages on the Web

Location: 
Grand Ballroom - Salon F
Abstract: 

JavaScript runs everywhere and is familiar to a huge community of developers, and consequently many applications are written in JavaScript these days. There are times however when other languages are desired, for example because of existing codebases, preferred language features, or performance. In this talk we'll discuss writing and deploying web applications that use both handwritten JavaScript and another language like C++ that has been compiled into JavaScript. We will present the advantages of that approach, open source tools like Emscripten and Embind that enable it, asm.js optimizations which let it run at near-native speeds, and several real-world examples of such projects.

Alon Zakai's picture
Alon is a researcher at Mozilla, working on techniques for compiling code to the web platform. In 2010 Alon founded the Emscripten open source project which utilizes LLVM to compile C and C++ to JavaScript, with the goal of allowing existing codebases to be automatically ported to standard web technologies, and recently has been collaborating on asm.js, a highly-optimizable subset of JavaScript primarily intended as a compiler target