WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
tutorials.technology
WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
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Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#2As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#3As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
DOM has some serious advantages, to name a few:
- Machine readability. Graphics scraping is gross, but DOM is by default a machine parseable format.
- For web pages which are actual documents, it makes total sense and is in fact a pretty clean implementation of a document and styling system. Especially in comparison to stuff like Microsoft word's doc format. If you would like to dispute the point, I challenge you to design something better. You don't even need to implement it, just make a compelling design. Or link to somebody else who has.
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#4As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
I find it very strange that you see 'web development' as something that's bad, and the answer to it is to write C and ship assembly code to clients.
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#5As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
I find it very strange that you see 'web development' as something that's bad, and the answer to it is to write C and ship assembly code to clients.
I find it very strange that you see minified, basically completely unreadable JS as better than C (straw man, it's actually "any programming language") and assembly.
If we aren't being disingenuous, it's "any language you want versus JS" and "minified, obfuscated JS versus assembly".
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#6As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
I find it very strange that you see 'web development' as something that's bad, and the answer to it is to write C and ship assembly code to clients.
Yup. As someone who can't tell an angular from an angle grinder but has read the ABI specs for every platform I use... the web does a lot of things right, and native code and assembly is where we see ourselves tethered to the bad design decisions of over four decades ago.
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#7Note that the instructions provided here are not the recommended path, which is described on the main site:
http://webassembly.org/getting-started/developers-guide/
The link here uses a nonstandard approach, which happens to work on a tiny program as in the example, but won't work on other things (for example, malloc or printf won't work). It also requires more steps to perform (4 vs 1 in the main site).
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#8As someone who has stayed far away from the perils of web development, will this be the step that finally makes it sane again? I figure the sooner the DOM + JavaScript/EMCAScript die the better; and with asm.js and WebGL I thought that day finally came... but nope. 3 years later we're still scuttling around bad design decisions of over two decades ago.
I don't see the DOM going away under wasm. It's a useful convention, and works just fine for the majority of webpage development.
Canvas is always there if you need it.
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it very strange that you see 'web development' as something that's bad, and the answer to it is to write C and ship assembly code to clients.
I find it very strange that you see minified, basically completely unreadable JS as better than C (straw man, it's actually "any programming language") and assembly. If we aren't being disingenuous, it's "any language you want versus JS" and "minified, obfuscated JS versus assembly".
The web has a free software problem (either that, or native code has a free software anti-problem because distributing portable precompiled code is so hard), but I find minified JS no more or less acceptable, as a language to read, than assembly generated from an optimizing compiler.
That said, minified JS on the web runs in a sandbox with a sane security model (yes, browsers don't implement it 100% right, but at least there's a model there). Optimized native code without source does whatever it likes to any file on my single-user machine, and we're expected to be okay with that (cf. https://xkcd.com/1200/). If I'm asked to choose between running one of the two, my vote is with the web app, no question.
Re: WebAssembly initial steps tutorial
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it very strange that you see 'web development' as something that's bad, and the answer to it is to write C and ship assembly code to clients.
Yup. As someone who can't tell an angular from an angle grinder but has read the ABI specs for every platform I use... the web does a lot of things right, and native code and assembly is where we see ourselves tethered to the bad design decisions of over four decades ago.
native code is not the problem... there are many libraries that abstract over platforms just like the web does.... the problem is people who make software that does not abstract away platform specifics