Emscripten - the saviour we have been waiting for?
Turn the clock back a few years and listen to the promise of this new language called Java. "Write once, run anywhere" was going to change the way developers wrote applications. It didn't matter what OS, browser or device you were using, Java was going to be there. It didn't quite work out that way. Most mobile devices don't run the garden variety of Java (Android certainly relies on Java, but much to Oracle's disgust, it is not their Java), I haven't seen an applet based website in years, and even desktop Java applications are hard to come by if you are not a developer. It was JavaScript that won the battle for the ubiquitous development platform. Speed and functionality still varies between devices, but if you want to write code that at least has a chance of running everywhere, JavaScript is your best choice. The problem with JavaScript is that it lacks a lot of the libraries that other languages have had years to build up. This void is something t...