Mozilla's SpiderMonkey team has announced the deprecation of asm.js, a low-level subset of JavaScript that was a precursor to WebAssembly. The technology, which was crucial for enabling near-native performance in web browsers before WebAssembly's introduction, will be removed from future SpiderMonkey releases as WebAssembly has now become the standard for high-performance web applications. The move reflects the web platform's evolution and the successful adoption of WebAssembly across all major browsers.
Background
Asm.js was introduced by Mozilla in 2013 as a highly optimizable subset of JavaScript that could be compiled from languages like C++ to run in web browsers with near-native performance. It served as a stepping stone to WebAssembly, which was later developed as a more efficient and standardized solution for running compiled code on the web.
- Source
- Hacker News (RSS)
- Published
- May 20, 2026 at 08:01 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10