As a web developer working primarily in JS, what should I be learning now to stay relevant/up-to-date once WebAssembly is more common? Are we going to see more web stuff built with c++, like the dsp example in this blog post?
Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
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Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you used this at all, it was in a Chrome-only app; this is pretty far from mainstream. A good rule of thumb seems to be to use what everyone else uses, and make sure you're always ready to ship another version. People expecting compiled apps to survive unchanged for years are out of luck.
Not true. NaCl is pretty big in some areas of Consumer Electronics.
Can you provide some examples?
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#13Looks like Mozilla won this fight.
When Mozilla didn't accept PNaCl and Pepper API proposed by Google, Mozilla went down the ASM path which now led us to Web Assembly being the general way forward.
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#14At this point, I really loathe adopting any facet of web-browser technology: there are too many broken APIs in too many browsers to maintain on both sides of the system: the browser developers have an insane number of combinations of features that need to be useful, secured and made reliable and developers for browsers are always at some weird disadvantage where they can spend months or years maintaining an applicati…
Deprecated APIs is the cost we pay for innovation. If we're going to get new APIs then it's reasonable to expect that old, little used and superseded APIs will be retired, since the browser vendors don't have unlimited resources.
Of course, it's understandable for those who are hit by a deprecation to be annoyed, but overall I think the tradeoff is worth it. It's definitely better than have unchanging APIs and having browsers becoming less relevant over time.
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#15As a web developer working primarily in JS, what should I be learning now to stay relevant/up-to-date once WebAssembly is more common? Are we going to see more web stuff built with c++, like the dsp example in this blog post?
To your second question, WebAssembly shouldn't be affecting your day-to-day standard frontend development, unless you're developing very performant applications like games, simulations, etc.
For resources, MDN has a great introduction. Pretty up-to-date too. [1].
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/C_to_wa...
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#16OK, so where do I get a mosh client programmed in WebAssembly? Without it, my chromebooks might as well be bricks.
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#17As a web developer working primarily in JS, what should I be learning now to stay relevant/up-to-date once WebAssembly is more common? Are we going to see more web stuff built with c++, like the dsp example in this blog post?
I don't think WebAssembly will become more common than JavaScript anytime soon. And even when it will be, it means the tooling will have become so good that you won't even have to think about WebAssembly. That will be left to the people who create compilers to WebAssembly.
Hopefully you'll just use whatever language your org/team/etc. uses, and have it compiled to JS or WebAssembly as is most appropriate for said language.
To answer your other question, I most certainly hope we won't see "more Web stuff" built with C++. C++ is a terrible language for that. It's a very good language to do stuff that needs predictable high performance such as games. And games is a good market for C++ in the browser through WebAssembly. But other than that I hope other, more high level languages will pick up.
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#18As a web developer working primarily in JS, what should I be learning now to stay relevant/up-to-date once WebAssembly is more common? Are we going to see more web stuff built with c++, like the dsp example in this blog post?
A good way to gauge this is maybe looking at the app ecosystem and seeing how many apps rely on lower level APIs to perform their tasks.
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you used this at all, it was in a Chrome-only app; this is pretty far from mainstream. A good rule of thumb seems to be to use what everyone else uses, and make sure you're always ready to ship another version. People expecting compiled apps to survive unchanged for years are out of luck.
Not true. NaCl is pretty big in some areas of Consumer Electronics.
This is about Google Native Client not the crypto library.
Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
#20Then perhaps Andreas Gal's "Chrome Won" assertion wasn't entirely accurate. After all WebAssembly is something that was derived from Mozilla's asm.js.
The assertion was about market share so the fact that Chrome might have adopted some mozilla-derived technology doesn't affect its accuracy.