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Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

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Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#271
post #172
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, not when my native game needs 50GB of install space. There is no way I'm waiting for that progress bar to download in a webassembly version game. This is one area where native will always have an advantage. The network is no match for the local bus.

Downloading it from steam takes just as mush time. But that 50GB is probably for more then 100 hours of playtime, which amounts to a persistent 145kb/s. With some caching up front, I think this could actually work. There literally is no need to have everything on disk before starting. Maybe a few hundred megs before starting, but even that is less then a few minutes on most connections, which is a lot faster then dow…

PS4 has gone this way already. When downloading a game you might get two progress bars. You can start the game when the first one is done, and it will download the rest of the game while you're playing. Microsoft has had this tech for a long time, I know they use it for MS Office programs at least.

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. We already have threads. What I find most painful about this development is that this new platform requires Javascript and wrapping everything inside an HTML document.

WebAssebly is here to let one replace Javascript. Not to depend on it. (It's the other way around, if you want to keep using Javascript, the expectation is that you'll start to depend on WebAssemby in the future.)

It might go that way eventually, but right now, you still have to deal with JS at least to load up the wasm program and get a useful result out of it to present to the user.

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#273
post #87

This is neat and shows great potential, I hope in future that Adobe products would be integrated with WebAssembly or even old products converted to WebAssembly and running in the browser. We shouldn't be that far off.

Are you thinking like Photoshop, or a sandbox for Flash?

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#274

This is just fantastic. The "happy 2018!" news i was waiting for. As i've said before, little by little we're witnessing the end of Javascript dominance.

Webassembly is still loaded through javascript, webassembly "apps" will be like libraries. You could compile other languages to js before, but the performance gain is really awesome.

>You could compile other languages to js before

In the mid-term, there will be no more reasons to do that. Just compile those languages straight to Webassembly.

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#275
post #136

Next we'll get to a webassembly-only VM that will replace the OS. All 'apps' will run on this VM instead of being native, and most will be cross platform. They'll talk to each other via messaging (using Javascript semantics) instead of bytes-over-pipes as they do today. An integrated globally available, namespaced data store API might replace the filesystem. Each app+version will be accessible by a distinct URL. 'My…

Add metrics and advertising obsessed companies into the mix and the only result could be a complete clusterfuck. The major issue with web apps is that the customer (or depending on the company bag of meat that watches the ads) has no control over the app or the data. They will be abused by the company in all sorts of creative ways. And yes, those VMs could be local-only, but why would Google, MS or Mozilla want that?…

I am hoping to time my exit from the field to coincide with this clusterfuck singularity.

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#277
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The web itself is harmless; it's the stuff you download and run that harms you.

Guns aren't dangerous! It's the bullets that will get you!

Yes, exactly. What's your point though?

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#278
post #41

So the web browser is pretty much a mini operating system. Firefox and Chromium seriously feel like they have the longest compile time out of any package in Gentoo, except maybe Libreoffice. It has tons of embedded packages that it doesn't pull from the system/native (jpeg and png decoders and such). So with a lot of these neat things where we compile stuff or run a Linux kernel in the browser, we've pretty much come…

I have been thinking about why we have ended up here, and why not just native apps. The obvious answer is that it makes applications portable, which is great. The other key component I think is delivery. You don't ever install anything, it just exists when you ask for it. That is something native applications have never done, and not even something like JVM has done even though it addresses portability too. It is als…

> I have been thinking about why we have ended up here, and why not just native apps.

That's what Java was supposed to be.

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#279
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code No browser has provided that either. In fact, browsers are by definition a security anti-feature because they are always connected to the network and the customer/user data lives on the network. Even if they manage to solve the problem of computers getting hacked when visiting websites they are very unlikely to solve the problems of tracking and private data…

I've been using the web for over twenty years and it has never harmed my computer or invaded my system in any way. I do think I've seen adware and scumware that may have originated on the web on friends computers but I'm pretty sure they did something like allow a toolbar to be installed. Can you give an example of an exploit that did not require user permission,did not use a plugin, and that allowed arbitrary code e…

> I've been using the web for over twenty years and it has never harmed my computer or invaded my system in any way

How do you know? Basically every browser has a RCE vulnerability a month and has for 20 years. From ancient JPEG vulnerabilities to modern video codecs and DOM manipulation vulnerabilities.

Re: Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly

#280
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The METAL (proposed by Gary Bernhardt) is not about running in CPU, but running all software in byte code and render native code obsolete, by implementing software process isolation and save the overhead of syscalls, memory mapping and protection rings.

IBM’s AS/400=eServer is basically implemented this way since 1988 years (some of it going back to 1979). Everything old is new again. (It has 128 but pointers, btw - so it’s future proof for at least 20 more years)

The original bytecode OS is AFAIK the UCSD p-System (from 1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal
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