71–80 of 91 posts
I hope wasm becomes the first class citizen and JavaScript becomes just one out of many languages that compiles to it. JavaScript is not bad at the high level, but at the low level it has been hell for engineers to implement a fast VM. A wasm VM is way easier to implement than a JavaScript VM.
The fastest VMs on the planet are JS VMs right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTML/CSS/JS has some huge advantages from the user perspective. When a designer has made some questionable choices, all it takes is a user stylesheet or a quick tour to the devtools to fix the font size and contrast ratio. The whole world of extensions that improve existing websites with additional buttons etc. is only possible because the page structure is exposed in the DOM. If Reddit were only WASM rendering on a…
Also, nobody wants to pay a C++ dev for doing a JS devs work, haha
Man, we are bringing a giant load of complexity into the browser with this. As I understand it, what we get in return is a 2x speed increase. I wonder if its worth it.
We are potentially removing the complexity at all ends. Right now the chain is: Developer writes code in something like Typescript that then is translated to Javascript and then is downloaded by the browser (huge downloads compared to binary code). The browser then needs to parse that huge amount of javascript code to compile it into a bytecode that can then be JIT executed or interpreted. With webassembly it would b…
There's countries in the world that still use IE6, and that's comparatively an easier transition :)
I hope wasm becomes the first class citizen and JavaScript becomes just one out of many languages that compiles to it. JavaScript is not bad at the high level, but at the low level it has been hell for engineers to implement a fast VM. A wasm VM is way easier to implement than a JavaScript VM.
Has it? The fastest VMs on the planet are JS VMs right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTML/CSS/JS has some huge advantages from the user perspective. When a designer has made some questionable choices, all it takes is a user stylesheet or a quick tour to the devtools to fix the font size and contrast ratio. The whole world of extensions that improve existing websites with additional buttons etc. is only possible because the page structure is exposed in the DOM. If Reddit were only WASM rendering on a…
reddit would probably have an opensource rendering layer or third party uis that use it's api. wasm will be the new android without the need to install apps.
I hope wasm becomes the first class citizen and JavaScript becomes just one out of many languages that compiles to it. JavaScript is not bad at the high level, but at the low level it has been hell for engineers to implement a fast VM. A wasm VM is way easier to implement than a JavaScript VM.
I do like the upside, but coupled with DRM support, it's going to be used to obfuscate, hide and control things. I'm expecting a much less open web coming.