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W3C recommends WebAssembly

w3.org

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Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#11

Post by nicoburns »

markstos wrote: post #8

This is bad for frontend JavaScript being "open" for review, right? Companies will ask their developers to deliver WASM resources in the name of performance. As a notable side-effect, it will become harder to review how websites work. Yes, I'm sure there will be reverse-compilation tools for WASM, but still.

Complex websites are already delivering minified source. This isn't really meaningfully different. Luckily with so much open source code, it's less important to be able to inspect live websites these days.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#12

Post by williamdclt »

markstos wrote: post #8

This is bad for frontend JavaScript being "open" for review, right? Companies will ask their developers to deliver WASM resources in the name of performance. As a notable side-effect, it will become harder to review how websites work. Yes, I'm sure there will be reverse-compilation tools for WASM, but still.

It's pretty rare companies ask their devs for a specific tech. The execs don't really have any idea what is the difference between JS and WASM, or what is WASM, or what is JS.

And minified JS isn't particularly more reviewable I think

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#13

Post by icey »

markstos wrote: post #8

This is bad for frontend JavaScript being "open" for review, right? Companies will ask their developers to deliver WASM resources in the name of performance. As a notable side-effect, it will become harder to review how websites work. Yes, I'm sure there will be reverse-compilation tools for WASM, but still.

So much frontend JS has been packed and minified now that I’m not sure it will make that much difference. Reviewing Open Source code is still a far superior way to understand how code works, imo.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#14

Post by dmvinson »

This feels like another step away from the free and open web many people are clamoring for. Distributing opaque binaries with websites instead of Javascript is a step past even the obfuscated minified javascript files meant to be confusing. At least those can still be debugged, stepped through, and explored freely by the end user if they want to learn or reverse engineer. Is there any tool or standard being worked on to make .wasm files coherent for users who have to run the code to view websites? This feels like a step backwards in so many ways, even if it is a technological marvel.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#15

Post by kevingadd »

dm33tri wrote: post #2

Write once, run everywhere. I bet in few years we will run wasm natively on processor.

WASM is poorly designed for execution directly in-silicon. It's not that kind of IR. You'd lower it into some other representation no matter what, so why not x86 or ARM? The hardware already exists and the development tools exist too.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#16

Post by Gaelan »

markstos wrote: post #8

This is bad for frontend JavaScript being "open" for review, right? Companies will ask their developers to deliver WASM resources in the name of performance. As a notable side-effect, it will become harder to review how websites work. Yes, I'm sure there will be reverse-compilation tools for WASM, but still.

I mean, technically, browser support changes nothing here—if you wanted wasm-level obfuscation, you could compile wasm to js, or you could write a wasm interpreter in js. I guess this normalizes writing code like this, but that’s it.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#17

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

dm33tri wrote: post #2

Write once, run everywhere. I bet in few years we will run wasm natively on processor.

WASM machines--the next (hopefully) better version of Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)!

It looks like Gary Bernhardt was pretty spot on in his talk "The Birth and Death of JavaScript": (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...)

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#18

Post by mbrock »

dmvinson wrote: post #14

This feels like another step away from the free and open web many people are clamoring for. Distributing opaque binaries with websites instead of Javascript is a step past even the obfuscated minified javascript files meant to be confusing. At least those can still be debugged, stepped through, and explored freely by the end user if they want to learn or reverse engineer. Is there any tool or standard being worked on…

Doesn’t that reasoning also imply that GNU and Linux are awfully opaque and not free nor open, since they are typically distributed as binaries?

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#19

Post by duxup »

Does anyone have any good intro resources for WebAssembly for noobs?

I've read articles here and there seen some in person demos, and honestly struggle to understand what it is / how it would / works relative to the current state of JavaScript frameworks.

Often I'm approaching it from a JavaScript framework (React/Vue/Angular) approach as I'm a bit of a noob to the industry and that's generally my day job working on web applications.... and while I read about WebAssembly I wonder about state management and someone tells me "oh you still need to something to do that" and I'm a bit lost on ... how that would work / why I would or wouldn't use one of those frameworks anyway, etc. So many examples I've seen are one off simplified (and for good reason I like those for demos) widgets but ... I'm not sure I've seen them as an application / understand how that would work.

Obviously I'm missing a lot here and feel like on HN I'm often talking to folks who aren't so much front end web devs who are excited about the efficiencies and such but ... not sure how this plays out in a practical sense / relative to the state of web applications as they are now.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#20

Post by dkersten »

dmvinson wrote: post #14

This feels like another step away from the free and open web many people are clamoring for. Distributing opaque binaries with websites instead of Javascript is a step past even the obfuscated minified javascript files meant to be confusing. At least those can still be debugged, stepped through, and explored freely by the end user if they want to learn or reverse engineer. Is there any tool or standard being worked on…

In my opinion it’s been a long time since direct access to Javascript has been useful. Yes you can unminify javascript but it’s still more work than most people will go through (especially if the code was generated by a compile to javascript language)so for most people things aren’t really changing that much
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