Badass JS

A fair response, although I might quibble with your choice of the term "moron"; if that was what I thought, I doubt I'd have bothered replying to you at all.

(I note also that, in my earlier reply, I forgot to mention that several Foobar2000 users have requested better self-signed cert support from Pawlowski, whom I've never seen to respond favorably to such a request. I saw little value in registering for the HydrogenAudio forums, solely in order to weigh in on the side of a feature which the developer plainly doesn't consider worth his while to add.)

I've never seen a playback queue as anything other than possibly an imperfect workaround for the limitations imposed by the inability of playlists to contain nodes pointing to other playlists, and my frustration around the subject of Foobar's playback queue stems from the fact that it's not even any good at that, much less at being a good idea in its own right -- the fact that the queue's contents aren't even exposed in the UI without adding a plugin should, I concede, have served as a strong clue. (And your choice of Perlis' epigram strikes me as truly inspired! Why, indeed, should we have these two things, the playlist and the playback queue, which behave similarly but not identically, and whose coexistence requires a bunch of otherwise unnecessary special cases?)

I can appreciate your incredulity at playback queue (mis)behavior being a deal-breaker for anyone with foobar2000; annoying as I find those idiosyncrasies, they…

For (1): You're right that an option is to compile the VM itself to asm.js (since the VM is usually written C/C++ code; JITs are an obvious exception since they generate machine code at runtime). This has already been done, e.g., for Java [1] and Lua [2]. What is meant by "supporting GC languages" is translating GC objects in the source language to real JavaScript objects so that the JS GC may be used on them. For statically-typed source languages like .NET/JVM, the proposed Typed Objects extension to JavaScript [3] could be naturally integrated into asm.js to describe classes. This is all a little ways off since Typed Objects needs to be standardized first. Also, the lack of finalizers in JS would limit the fidelity of the translation.

For (2): yes, it is already being worked on [4].

[1] xmlvm.org
[2] http://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/lua.vm.js.html
[3] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:typed_objects
[4] http://badassjs.com/post/43158184752/qt-gui-toolkit-ported-to-javascript-via-emscripten

On Firefox (which originally introduced it), finding "use asm" at the top of the script makes a subset of JavaScript faster by enabling an Ahead-Of-Time optimizing compiler. See http://badassjs.com/post/43420901994/asm-js-a-low-level-highly-optimizable-subset-of. From what I understand, "asm.js" code without the "use asm" directive in Firefox would run slower because it wouldn't check it for compliance with the asm.js subset and enable the specialized AOT codepath.

It's an interesting approach but feels a bit like over-specialization. The V8 guys on the other hand, decided to ignore the directive entirely and have been able to improve their (more "generic") JIT compiler to get it to run the same code almost as fast as Firefox's Ahead-Of-Time compiler in a lot of cases.

Right now, two codecs cover all the browsers that matter. Internet Explorer supports WebM, but doesn't ship with the codec; Google provides the WebM codec for Internet Explorer (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf). That just leaves Safari and iOS that still only support H.264.

Personally, as JavaScript engines get faster, I hope for solutions like this in the future: http://badassjs.com/post/13551173773/route9-js-a-vp8-webm-decoder-in-javascript

Meanwhile, if Adobe would ever get around to adding WebM in Flash as previously promised, that would work as a fallback for Safari, as well as IE users without a WebM codec, leaving just iOS.

One of the feeds I to which I subscribe, preemptively moved off of Feeedburner a couple days ago.

http://badassjs.com/post/32738175366/moving-off-feedburner-please-update-your-rss-reader

The primary reason the author was using it was for the subscriber count. He created a quick script to wrap his feed to give him counts.

https://gist.github.com/3816875