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WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

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Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#171

Post by esrauch »

vanderZwan wrote: post #170

Aside: how is WebAssembly's binary form currently shipped? In a demo I saw yesterday it was written out inline as a Uint8Array of integers between 0-255. Even with gzip enabled this can't be very efficient. For completely unrelated reasons, I was already thinking of adapting (my fork of) the LZ-string library[0] to directly compress/decompress typed arrays to "websafe" UTF16 strings, similar to the already existing `…

wasm files are already a binary format, an explicit Uint8Array should only only necessary if you want to inline the wasm directly with the JS that instantiates it.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#172

Post by flanbiscuit »

tyingq wrote: post #124
flanbiscuit wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, couldn't someone build a js wasm bridge so that you could have DOM access? This[1] seems to suggest it's possible [1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/126

You can, it's just very slow. See this issue, for example: https://github.com/rust-webplatform/rust-webplatform/issues/...

Are they writing their own DOM parser in Rust though?

I should clarify what I meant. I was thinking more the way Cordova works where the JS side handles the DOM but the wasm side handles computations and they talk to each other via a "bridge". So maybe React can offload its heavier computations (diff-ing and what not) to a C lib compiled to wasm and it just returns data back to it.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#173

Post by dragonwriter »

foodstances wrote: post #153
sametmax wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In corporate env it is.

Either the computers in these mysterious corporate environments are exposed to the internet, in which case they'd be reflected in these public stats collected by them visiting public websites from IE, or they aren't, in which case they don't matter in the slightest because they're not going to visit webpages using WebAssembly.

Or, as is absolutely the case, because of the aggressive blocking and monitoring policies and restrictive usage policies in place in the kind of enterprises where IE remains common, they are exposed to the public internet and use public webpages, but with usage patterns which leave them underrepresented on the kind of sites that use third-party stat counters. OTOH, for certain other public websites, they are very large numbers of users.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#174

Post by greenhouse_gas »

KeitIG wrote: post #34

A good occasion to watch Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" [0] again, where he talks about the precursor of WebAssembly: asm.js and the future implication it "could" have in the future in a really humorous way. A few years old but still relevant. You want Gimp for Windows running in Firefox for Linux running in Chrome for Mac? Yeah sure. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and…

There's another reason why I want JavaScript in the browser to die:

We haven't had a new browser engine written from scratch since KHTML. Firefox is a descendant of Netscape, Chrome (and Safari) is a descendant of WebKit which is itself a descendant of KHTML, Edge is closed source, but I'm almost sure there's some old IE code in there.

Why?

It's simply too expensive to create a fast (and compatible) JS engine.

If WebAssembly takes off, I hope that one we'll have more than three browser engines around.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#175

Post by greenhouse_gas »

holydude wrote: post #10

Can't wait for DOM interop and get away from JS on frontend. Seriously JS should not be the lingua franca of the web :)

Alternate universe: JVM was more secure and had better DOM interaction, so Applets won against JavaScript.

The world goes around in circles.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#176

Post by detaro »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #174
KeitIG wrote: post #34

A good occasion to watch Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" [0] again, where he talks about the precursor of WebAssembly: asm.js and the future implication it "could" have in the future in a really humorous way. A few years old but still relevant. You want Gimp for Windows running in Firefox for Linux running in Chrome for Mac? Yeah sure. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and…

There's another reason why I want JavaScript in the browser to die: We haven't had a new browser engine written from scratch since KHTML. Firefox is a descendant of Netscape, Chrome (and Safari) is a descendant of WebKit which is itself a descendant of KHTML, Edge is closed source, but I'm almost sure there's some old IE code in there. Why? It's simply too expensive to create a fast (and compatible) JS engine. If Web…

What do you base the assumption on that Javascript is the critical piece of complexity here? (it might very well be, but it's not obvious to me)

At least some of the JS engines are used in non-browser projects (V8 and Microsofts), which at least superficially would suggest you could write a new browser engine and tie it to one of those existing JS interpreters. WebAssembly will gain interfaces to the DOM as well, so the complexity of that interaction will remain.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#177

Post by skocznymroczny »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #174
KeitIG wrote: post #34

A good occasion to watch Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" [0] again, where he talks about the precursor of WebAssembly: asm.js and the future implication it "could" have in the future in a really humorous way. A few years old but still relevant. You want Gimp for Windows running in Firefox for Linux running in Chrome for Mac? Yeah sure. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and…

There's another reason why I want JavaScript in the browser to die: We haven't had a new browser engine written from scratch since KHTML. Firefox is a descendant of Netscape, Chrome (and Safari) is a descendant of WebKit which is itself a descendant of KHTML, Edge is closed source, but I'm almost sure there's some old IE code in there. Why? It's simply too expensive to create a fast (and compatible) JS engine. If Web…

How about Servo?

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#178

Post by aroman »

subb wrote: post #154
sametmax wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In corporate env it is.

It's important because of internal websites stuck in the past. I doubt you'll ever need web assembly support for those.

Yeah, you could just run IE6 inside Chrome/Firefox via wasm :)

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#179

Post by Klathmon »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #174
KeitIG wrote: post #34

A good occasion to watch Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" [0] again, where he talks about the precursor of WebAssembly: asm.js and the future implication it "could" have in the future in a really humorous way. A few years old but still relevant. You want Gimp for Windows running in Firefox for Linux running in Chrome for Mac? Yeah sure. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and…

There's another reason why I want JavaScript in the browser to die: We haven't had a new browser engine written from scratch since KHTML. Firefox is a descendant of Netscape, Chrome (and Safari) is a descendant of WebKit which is itself a descendant of KHTML, Edge is closed source, but I'm almost sure there's some old IE code in there. Why? It's simply too expensive to create a fast (and compatible) JS engine. If Web…

I completely disagree that the issue is JavaScript here.

In my opinion, the issue is the DOM. It's API is massive, there is decades of cruft and backwards compatibility to worry about, and it's codebase is significantly larger in all major open source browsers out there.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#180

Post by flanbiscuit »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #177
greenhouse_gas wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another reason why I want JavaScript in the browser to die: We haven't had a new browser engine written from scratch since KHTML. Firefox is a descendant of Netscape, Chrome (and Safari) is a descendant of WebKit which is itself a descendant of KHTML, Edge is closed source, but I'm almost sure there's some old IE code in there. Why? It's simply too expensive to create a fast (and compatible) JS engine. If Web…

How about Servo?

yeah, wasn't this (or related to it) at the top of HN just yesterday?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15686653

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