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WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

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Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#41

Post by Sean1708 »

jordigh wrote: post #29

Remember when you could hit "View Source" to see how the web was built? I don't like where this is going. Minification was bad enough, now we're going to be getting more non-free blobs shoved into our browsers and this is being touted as a great new feature for us. It will end up being a tool of control and surveillance like always. This guy says it a bit more eloquently than I can: https://lobste.rs/s/wjtu7c/webasse…

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#wil...

The text form of Wasm looks like it's going to be far easier to read than minified JS.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#42

Post by floatboth »

reedlaw wrote: post #40
almostdigital wrote: post #9

I recommend anyone wanting to experiment with WASM to check out https://github.com/dcodeIO/webassembly which takes a lot of pain out of setting up the toolchain and lets you produce much leaner binaries as well. Also keep an eye on https://github.com/dcodeIO/AssemblyScript :)

How about https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen ?

It's a lower level tool that's used by most things, including the linked project.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#43

Post by AriaMinaei »

jordigh wrote: post #29

Remember when you could hit "View Source" to see how the web was built? I don't like where this is going. Minification was bad enough, now we're going to be getting more non-free blobs shoved into our browsers and this is being touted as a great new feature for us. It will end up being a tool of control and surveillance like always. This guy says it a bit more eloquently than I can: https://lobste.rs/s/wjtu7c/webasse…

This was discussed literally the day wasm was announced, and Brendan Eich weighed in too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9734947

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#44

Post by icedchai »

Houshalter wrote: post #38
jordigh wrote: post #29

Remember when you could hit "View Source" to see how the web was built? I don't like where this is going. Minification was bad enough, now we're going to be getting more non-free blobs shoved into our browsers and this is being touted as a great new feature for us. It will end up being a tool of control and surveillance like always. This guy says it a bit more eloquently than I can: https://lobste.rs/s/wjtu7c/webasse…

Bullshit. Wasm can't do anything js can't. Especially with asm.js. Don't try to argue that minified or transpiled js is somehow more readable than wasm. At least it's easier to decompile in theory. It's absolutely not a "tool for surveillance". How exactly are you going to surveil anything with it? It's not even a replacement for js, or at least it shouldn't be used that way. No GC for instance. And if you are doing…

I hope future generations are going to laugh at what a what a kluge "web app" development was... but I'm not so sure.

We'd have been better off fixing Java applets, instead of reinventing the wheel. So now 20 years later, we're cross compiling C...

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#45

Post by MrPatan »

Houshalter wrote: post #38
jordigh wrote: post #29

Remember when you could hit "View Source" to see how the web was built? I don't like where this is going. Minification was bad enough, now we're going to be getting more non-free blobs shoved into our browsers and this is being touted as a great new feature for us. It will end up being a tool of control and surveillance like always. This guy says it a bit more eloquently than I can: https://lobste.rs/s/wjtu7c/webasse…

Bullshit. Wasm can't do anything js can't. Especially with asm.js. Don't try to argue that minified or transpiled js is somehow more readable than wasm. At least it's easier to decompile in theory. It's absolutely not a "tool for surveillance". How exactly are you going to surveil anything with it? It's not even a replacement for js, or at least it shouldn't be used that way. No GC for instance. And if you are doing…

> flash and java applets

And ActiveX! you probably repressed the memory of that one, sorry to remind you.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#46

Post by ThePhysicist »

mbel wrote: post #37
ThePhysicist wrote: post #19

I'm trying to use asm.js to port Python to JS as a shared library, which would allow us to load and run arbitrary CPython modules (compiled for JS) in the browser. I generate code using emscripten, which is also able to generate WASM (which I'm not using at the moment though). My experience so far: Emscripten is quite mature and compiles even very complex C/C++ code without complaining. Statically linking code works…

> Emscripten is quite mature and compiles even very complex C/C++ code without complaining. Because it's just Clang with WASM target.

I think it's a bit more than that given that the project has amassed more than 16.000 commits so far.

You must not forget that JS does not provide support for many of the things that are required to run a C program (e.g. printing), so emscripten needs to take care of providing alternative implementations for all these things.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#47

Post by snomad »

icedchai wrote: post #44
Houshalter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. Wasm can't do anything js can't. Especially with asm.js. Don't try to argue that minified or transpiled js is somehow more readable than wasm. At least it's easier to decompile in theory. It's absolutely not a "tool for surveillance". How exactly are you going to surveil anything with it? It's not even a replacement for js, or at least it shouldn't be used that way. No GC for instance. And if you are doing…

I hope future generations are going to laugh at what a what a kluge "web app" development was... but I'm not so sure. We'd have been better off fixing Java applets, instead of reinventing the wheel. So now 20 years later, we're cross compiling C...

After 20 years of web dev, I gave native development (UWP) a shot. I kinda assumed that after so much time Microsoft would have windows development dialed in and it would be sane. Ha!

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#48

Post by mediocrejoker »

I was disappointed that this doesn't really explain what webassembly is, and the link that says 'if you don't know what webassembly is, click here' just redirects to a tank game with no explanation.

I thought maybe it was some way to write x86 assembly in the browser, but apparently it's a tank game.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#49

Post by jakelazaroff »

jordigh wrote: post #29

Remember when you could hit "View Source" to see how the web was built? I don't like where this is going. Minification was bad enough, now we're going to be getting more non-free blobs shoved into our browsers and this is being touted as a great new feature for us. It will end up being a tool of control and surveillance like always. This guy says it a bit more eloquently than I can: https://lobste.rs/s/wjtu7c/webasse…

What I don't understand about this viewpoint is, don't all of these caveats also apply to native apps?

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#50

Post by blaze33 »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #48

I was disappointed that this doesn't really explain what webassembly is, and the link that says 'if you don't know what webassembly is, click here' just redirects to a tank game with no explanation. I thought maybe it was some way to write x86 assembly in the browser, but apparently it's a tank game.

Thanks for the feedback, I should probably link to http://webassembly.org/ instead and link demos after this.
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