Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

blog.openbloc.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 153 posts

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#101

Post by radarsat1 »

I actually went through all the steps of getting rustc and emscripten working, got it set up in Docker. It actually works, I was able to compile a rust program to wasm. But.. because emscripten uses a custom version of LLVM and clang, the image took up 25 GB of my harddrive! I just don't have that kind of space to leave it lying around, so I'll have to wait until they integrate into upstream I guess.

I might work a bit in Rust by itself and compile using emscripten later on the server, but kind of hard to do that if I want to access DOM/canvas/webGL, etc.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#102

Post by steveklabnik »

johngruber wrote: post #39

This can probably only be expected to get better and better. While JS engines are squeezing hard to get some extra performance, WASM is just beginning its life. It'd be great if someone would make (when it's technological feasible) a way to integrate this natively in node, something like: const wasm = require('wasm-native'); (async () => { const mymodule = await wasm('mymodule.c'); // use mymodule here })();

This is a little old, but you can use wasm from node http://thecodebarbarian.com/getting-started-with-webassembly...

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#103

Post by angersock »

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…

Author here of that comment here (thanks JordiGH!).

It's really entertaining watching this subthread, let me tell you.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#104

Post by analognoise »

sp332 wrote: post #79
analognoise wrote: post #74

Near native performance - what a joke.

Got a specific benchmark or task you think will be much slower than native?

Anything?

You're carting around an entire browser, it's so far from native that it's completely laughable.

As a point of reference: In 1984: MacPaint, 5,822 lines of Apple Pascal, 3583 lines of assembly QuickDraw (dependency): 17,101 lines, all assembly Compiled Size: 0.05MB

Today, Chrome: Number of lines of code: 16 MILLION Webkit (alone): 10.3 MILLION Install size: ~200MB

We have a bunch of people who aren't skilled enough to deal with a real machine who think they're still "near native". Every single thing won't be as fast, or as small, as the underlying hardware can be using toolkits and platforms that have been available for 20+ years (cross platform toolkits and Java both). For god's sake, Java is a portable VM! wxWidgets is cross-platform, and open source!

We accept an operating system in our way as it is, and now we accept not only an operating system, but an entire browser as well? Our computers are faster than supercomputers used to be - why does Photoshop (or ANY program) take so long to load?

We have to go the other direction - start removing all the garbage from computing, keep the best bits, throw the rest out. If you can't hack on a real computer, that's fine - you have the Webassembly sandbox. But don't label it "near native" - it just shows you don't care enough about computers to read about them. I hear that and it sounds like my gradma talking about computers - that same level of understanding. Nana is amazing, but she's not so great at computers. And these people are supposed to be developers?

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#105

Post by akavel »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #95

I wonder how it would be, had capability-based system architectures taken off and become mainstream. I guess we wouldn't need WebAssembly to run untrusted code safely, because in such a system, all objects – from whole programs to an object as small as the number 4 – would be safe and sealed off from each other on a hardware level. I'm reading Capability-Based Computer Systems [0] by Henry M. Levy (1984), motivated b…

You may like browsing through comments by @nickpsecurity (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickpsecurity&next=1..., etc.). He's really knowledgeable about this stuff, and tries to popularize it as much as he can.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#106

Post by snomad »

infinityplus1 wrote: post #80
snomad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

How was your experience with UWP?

Overall, not sure, part frustrated, part liking it.

Good C# is fantastic

Between the Community Toolkit and Telerik's UWP UI, there are some fantastic open source controls available for reuse.

Bad XAML editing can be frustrating, the visual state setters don't recognize the local properties, which leads to a lot of copy/paste and no help w/errors (e.g. TextBlock.RelativePanel.AlignTopWithPanel is wrong and should be TextBlock.(RelativePanel.AlignTopWithPanel), but intellisense gives no hint).

Using the new x:Bind I couldn't get blend to show design time data, it only showed the property names, which is misleading when you have a long property name holding a small string value.

There are a whole bunch of other little frustrations like those 2 above, the net effect of which is a minor aversion to the XAML side of things.

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#107

Post by Someone »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #95

I wonder how it would be, had capability-based system architectures taken off and become mainstream. I guess we wouldn't need WebAssembly to run untrusted code safely, because in such a system, all objects – from whole programs to an object as small as the number 4 – would be safe and sealed off from each other on a hardware level. I'm reading Capability-Based Computer Systems [0] by Henry M. Levy (1984), motivated b…

In case you don't have it yet: "the Burroughs B5000 conference" (http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107105/oh0...) is a transcript of a set of discussions held in 1985 by people involved in creating the B5000. I found it an interesting read. Abstract:

"The Burroughs 5000 computer series is discussed by individuals responsible for its development and marketing from 1957 through the 1960s in a conference sponsored by AFIPS and Burroughs Corporation.

In the first session the technical aspects of the B 5000 and 5500 are discussed by a group of managers, engineers, and consultants. Topics include: the state of the industry in the late 1950s; the 5000's predecessors, particularly the ElectroData 101 and 201, B 205, and B 220; factors influencing the decision to produce the B 5000; reasons for designing the machine for ALGOL rather than FORTRAN and the effect of this decision on the computer's development and sales. The group reviews the MCP operating system, PERM, Polish notation, descriptors, stacks, the BALGOL compiler, and other innovations of the computer.

In the second session, the same group discusses the development of the B 5000 into a product, including the effect of the administrative organization on the project; the relations between hardware and software engineers; the interaction of project personnel and upper-level management, field marketing, and customers; the COBOL processor, the head protract disk system; the operating system; ALGOL; and documentation of the computer.

In the third session managers, sales personnel, and customers of the B 5000 discuss Burroughs' product line before the 200 and 5000 series computers; sales training and market reaction to the B 5000; acceptance of B 5000s at Ohio Oil Company and Stanford University; its rejection by the University of Michigan; reasons why the B 5000 was not marketed overseas; and Burroughs' presidents Raymond Eppert and Ray MacDonald."

Re: WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first steps

#108

Post by sp332 »

analognoise wrote: post #104
sp332 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a specific benchmark or task you think will be much slower than native?

Anything? You're carting around an entire browser, it's so far from native that it's completely laughable. As a point of reference: In 1984: MacPaint, 5,822 lines of Apple Pascal, 3583 lines of assembly QuickDraw (dependency): 17,101 lines, all assembly Compiled Size: 0.05MB Today, Chrome: Number of lines of code: 16 MILLION Webkit (alone): 10.3 MILLION Install size: ~200MB We have a bunch of people who aren't skille…

Well I'm in favor of things running in a sandbox, especially random code delivered over the internet and run automatically in my browser. But aside from that, WebASM has a flat memory model and (so far) no built-in garbage collection. It has very few features, it's very fast to parse and it runs fast too. Even the asm.js version was fast back in 2013 https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/gap-between-asm-js-and-nat...

As for the rest, I don't know how you're measuring. Photoshop runs a lot faster than programs on my Centris 610 did, and sure it's a bloated mess of different programs glommed together but guess what, it does a lot more than smaller programs do. Your comment counts the cost of everything and the value of nothing. You can't click a link and get a brand-new full-featured word processor running on an old Mac in 10 seconds like you can by clicking https://docs.google.com/ But I can run MacPaint in my browser thanks to asm.js https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation

Post reply on HN