81–90 of 164 posts
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That doesn't sound like an improvement.
It is actually... It is going straight to native and built in on the browser instead of a call to a plugin and then a VM and finally to native.
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> "For example: I don't understand why Python, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, and so on have not delivered tools that ease the path for those who wish to write applications designed to run code from untrusted sources. I think this would make the web a lot more competitive and overall healthier as an independent institution." I don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?
I think running code from an untrusted source or semi-trusted source is an underdeveloped area that will bear fruit in the future, but I think the gains will be long-term rather than short-term. Today we live in a world where the source code that runs our advanced industrial society is owned and maintained in secret. And the business climate is highly competitive so a lot of people cut corners in terms of security. T…
As for native, I believe there's some work being done in some fields to make it easier for users to reliably compile from source, which would give them the opportunity to scan the source (using whatever tools make sense, even MD5 hashes or similar) before compilation. IIRC the Debian project was working on improving the reproducibility of builds, you may find more of what you're looking for by searching for that project.
As far as the intersection of (innovation in web technology) and (innovation in programming languages) is concerned, I think the focus on performance is like going backwards in time, perhaps to the mid 90s. I feel like these innovations are being turned into a kind of "social media spectacle" with relatively little discussion of what innovation really means in this context. For example: I don't understand why Python,…
You can run untrusted code in an iframe (possibly with the sandbox attribute set). I think this would be what you're looking for.
type in
console.log("foo")
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No, but one of the goals of WebAssembly is to have a textual representation, so in theory you could still View Source. Not sure how that'll work out in practice, though.
doesnt need to be the original source, as long as every browser has some form of decompiler to high level language (C like) Im good. But I cant imagine a future where we are served blobs with no way of knowing whats inside.
So could someone theoretically make flash or silverlight work via this?
Theoretically you can make those work in JavaScript. The performance might even be ok, but the limitations would still be the huge effort in reverse engineering flash or silver light code and features and secondly the browser sandbox policies which AFAIK aren't changed for WASM.
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Well, considering it was: - isolated (outside of DOM) - non standard (not everywhere) - third party (proprietary) - alien (uncanny value of different UI style) - bloated (even compared to the web stack, Spring was an over-engineered badly designed mess of a GUI API) - insecure (full of exploits to this very day, tons of them closed just last year) it does sound as a great improvement. Except in case you weren't there…
I was very much there, and I'd sooner eat my cat than go back to that era of Java. But C++? Is that really the best we can do? Everyone's so afraid of breaking backwards compatibility but I don't see any other way out of the never-ending accretion of hacks Eich left us with.
I’m also hoping it winds up being friendly enough to hand write WebAssembly for small chunks of numerical code. With asm.js, that’s currently kind of a pain.
Binary blobs on the web? Have we learnt nothing from ActiveX?
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Not sure if serious... This comment translates to "except without garbage-collection, and with a loose set of inconsistent and constantly-changing interfaces instead of One Sanctioned Spec."
Not sure why you think a GC is a good thing. Deterministic object disposal is to me way more convenient and safe than a GC (haven't you ever experienced a race when the GC dispose your memory too soon or not soon enough?)
GC is generally a good thing precisely because it prevents use-after-free errors and enables programming at a higher level without worrying about memory management. There is often a performance cost to this, it's true, but for large classes of programs it's a cost that's worth paying.
As far as the intersection of (innovation in web technology) and (innovation in programming languages) is concerned, I think the focus on performance is like going backwards in time, perhaps to the mid 90s. I feel like these innovations are being turned into a kind of "social media spectacle" with relatively little discussion of what innovation really means in this context. For example: I don't understand why Python,…
> For example: I don't understand why Python, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, and so on have not delivered tools that ease the path for those who wish to write applications designed to run code from untrusted sources. Probably because it is stupidly difficult to do robustly, especially when the language and standard libraries weren't originally designed to do that. Lua is perhaps best positioned for this given how tightly yo…