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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#311

Post by ccozan »

flavio81 wrote: post #243
Touche wrote: post #107

WebAssembly is nice and all, but I don't understand why Mozilla is so obsessed with this feature that will be useable by 0.01% of applications. Meanwhile they are falling far behind in a variety of features that are useful to a much bigger % of the web. Safari and Edge have leapfrogged Firefox in providing the important things to web developers.

As pointed out, this will be HUGE. For starters, this will enable client (browser) software development in a language other than Javascript/ES6. With, probably, a plethora of compilers to choose from, some of them giving better optiimizations than others. I think this will make an explosion of more browser-hosted applications, with much more power than before. And will make many more programmers go into serious front…

>full version of the language supporting the full libraries available for it.

Does this mean, simply said, that I can take any arbitrary windows desktop app written in C++, for example, and run it in browser on every other OS?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#312

Post by thaumasiotes »

OskarS wrote: post #226
Tomis02 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else. It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs. For example, when trying Chrome out soon after release, it managed to grind my PC to a halt because I dared open something like 5 tabs (whereas Opera was happily running double to triple digits). Back in 2008 multicore CPUs wer…

> It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs. I totally dispute that. I had a very modest PC at the time and I remember vividly using Chrome for the first time, noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox, especially if you had many tabs open.

I remember other people telling me it was much faster. I don't remember it actually being much faster, but I switched anyway because of horrific memory leak problems with firefox.

I'm back to firefox now.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#313

Post by sqeaky »

jhpriestley wrote: post #266

People seem way too optimistic about web assembly. The elephant in the room is download size. A wasm photoshop, even if it works and performs well, is still a multi-gigabyte "web page". The browser is in no way set up to handle that. Even simple things will be huge compared to javascript webpage. Let's say you write your todo app in Python with Qt bindings. Sure, wasm lets you run it on the web. You'll just have to s…

Except that the download size for an application of the same complexity in JS and Wasm looks like it will be smaller in Wasm. There are plenty of demo games made in Wasm that play great already. Doing the same thing as those demos requires larger JS and is slower in JS.

This just expands on what can be done now. No one is claiming this will fix everything, it will just allow more than we have now and leverage many of the advantages of native development.

As for photo shop, why does a Wasm application need to be structured the same way as a desktop app? Desktop apps shipped all the the software in a single download because that download came from a disc or was expected to be used after being disconnected from the Internet. Why not download the functionality piecemeal? Download a small set of libraries that enable core functionality, then download modules as they are requested. When the user clicks a menu or button go get the code that makes the functionality behind that work. I am not saying break up every button, but if there is a new screen of group of functionality, make that a module then go get that.

In a video game it could be broken into levels or regions the in game map. In gaming paged loading is a solved problem, it seems like it could be applied here. The next level or nearby regions can be downloaded while the player explores this one.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#314

Post by fixermark »

nathancahill wrote: post #288
fixermark wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be sufficient to just switch to FF. I think it likely that what FF needs is people putting in the grunt work of continuing to optimize the hell out of it so that it's performance-competitive with Chrome. Users will choose the fastest browser that works, in general.

Have you tried it recently? Mozilla has done exactly that. The latest version is faster than Chrome in some benchmarks.

I'm more interested in the elusive-but-oh-so-important "Feels faster" metric, which is harder to capture in benchmarks.

To my taste, Chrome juuuust edges out at a cursory glance, but barely (though at this point, it's a little sticky for me because it has my Google account credentials, my bookmarks backed up to the cloud, etc., etc.). But it's definitely looking better than it did when last I tried that comparison.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#315

Post by rwxsh »

johnhattan wrote: post #76

One of the best things about Flash was that you could pack up all your bytecode and bitmaps and vectors and sounds and fonts into a single compressed SWF file that contained your entire application/game/demo. That made it really easy to do stuff like double-click-able client demos and deliverables for websites. Ditto for Java and JAR files. Looks like the "compressed bytecode that runs really fast" part is now a real…

https://www.w3.org/TR/web-packaging/

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#316

Post by ooqr »

flavio81 wrote: post #243
Touche wrote: post #107

WebAssembly is nice and all, but I don't understand why Mozilla is so obsessed with this feature that will be useable by 0.01% of applications. Meanwhile they are falling far behind in a variety of features that are useful to a much bigger % of the web. Safari and Edge have leapfrogged Firefox in providing the important things to web developers.

As pointed out, this will be HUGE. For starters, this will enable client (browser) software development in a language other than Javascript/ES6. With, probably, a plethora of compilers to choose from, some of them giving better optiimizations than others. I think this will make an explosion of more browser-hosted applications, with much more power than before. And will make many more programmers go into serious front…

Sounds like a huge web page.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#317

Post by ebiester »

ccozan wrote: post #311
flavio81 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As pointed out, this will be HUGE. For starters, this will enable client (browser) software development in a language other than Javascript/ES6. With, probably, a plethora of compilers to choose from, some of them giving better optiimizations than others. I think this will make an explosion of more browser-hosted applications, with much more power than before. And will make many more programmers go into serious front…

>full version of the language supporting the full libraries available for it. Does this mean, simply said, that I can take any arbitrary windows desktop app written in C++, for example, and run it in browser on every other OS?

http://www.quakejs.com/

It required 3 days of porting from what I remember hearing.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#318

Post by sqeaky »

TekMol wrote: post #122
flohofwoe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a good overview from the emscripten author: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/why-webassembly-is-faster-... TL;DR: much faster parsing over asm.js (10x to 20x faster), parsing should also use much less memory, 10%..20% smaller downloads (when comparing the compressed sizes, uncompressed WASM is several times smaller then asm.js), 64-bit integers (these have to be emulated on asm.js),

much faster parsing Isn't parsing super fast already? From my experiments, jquery seems to compile in a staggering 0.1ms.

If you are using ms as a unit you several orders of magnitudes too slow for many domains.

3d gaming comes to mind, most games have a tight budget of 16ms per frame, and at those speeds 0.1 ms is a real chunk of that. If I am going to download a new module in then try to load it the game shouldn't have to hiccup for that.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#319

Post by wpietri »

2bitencryption wrote: post #273
wpietri wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones. But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it wil…

if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you. but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.

One of those words that is often a tell is "just". That's where people sweep a lot of things under the rug. Including here, where you've hidden the fact that you made an unsupported assertion that assumes an answer to the question we're discussing.

I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always have implications. That's why, e.g., boycotts are a thing: small decisions add up.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#320

Post by [deleted] »

2bitencryption wrote: post #273
wpietri wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones. But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it wil…

if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you. but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.

[deleted]
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