A fair question. I think it has parallels to Intel's itanium vs AMD's x64.
I cannot pretend to know what is best in a perfect world. Yet I am willing to pretend to know what is the more practical way forward.
Native Client is and was an interesting approach, but it requires buy in. Buy in which it was not getting, and it had several years to get said buy in.
When asm.js got announced I can only saw I was shocked. asm.js is brilliant! Brilliant in the same way utf-8 is. It does not require heavy changes yet could bring 90% of the benefit. It does not require a new sandbox. It is cross-platform and cross-architecture!
I cannot pretend to know what is best in a perfect world. Yet I am willing to pretend to know what is the more practical way forward.
Native Client is and was an interesting approach, but it requires buy in. Buy in which it was not getting, and it had several years to get said buy in.
When asm.js got announced I can only saw I was shocked. asm.js is brilliant! Brilliant in the same way utf-8 is. It does not require heavy changes yet could bring 90% of the benefit. It does not require a new sandbox. It is cross-platform and cross-architecture!