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W3C recommends WebAssembly

w3.org

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Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#31

Post by eikenberry »

mbrock wrote: post #18
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?

Only if the sites using webassembly binaries also have the source available to download.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#32

Post by sitkack »

kevingadd wrote: post #15
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.

The instructions in your binaries aren't directly executed either, they get lowered into uOps.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#33

Post by mtrower »

mbrock wrote: post #18
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?

Well, for one thing, mature debuggers exist (the equivalent to the tooling he inquired about for .wasm).

More importantly, however, anything GPL must make source available and reasonably accessible. There is no such guarantee or even expectation for random programs on the web.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#34

Post by maeln »

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…

Please, can we stop having this argument every time there is an article about webassembly ? WASM not any more obfuscated than any minified JS. Being a bytecode doesn't make you "unfree". You have access to the same tool to debug JS and WASM. And the WASM specification is open. There is literally no difference between running JS or running WASM.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#35

Post by oefrha »

pastage wrote: post #27
oefrha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=wasm Pretty much all relevant browsers support wasm (and I suspect data for the few non-compliant Chinese browsers may be outdated, they’re definitely not last released in 2016 or 2017). Do you have some other idea of wasm-capable?

Our buisness instances are 30% IE, luckily not even that is enough to get anyone to care about IE around here.

At least you can rest assured it’ll never get wasm support.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#36

Post by dmvinson »

mbrock wrote: post #18
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?

The source for GNU and Linux is viewable by everyone, which negates the inability to view what is happening inside a binary. This is the problem Javascript source maps are meant to solve for the web, and I would welcome WASM more if part of the standard was a requirement for a source map when browser Dev Tools are open.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#37

Post by UncleEntity »

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…

> 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?

You can convert the binary files to/from the text (lisp like) format with readily available tools.

Also, the binary format is easily parsed -- made a parser with katai(sp?) struct in like an afternoon.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#38

Post by bogwog »

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…

> 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.

That's not true. There's nothing "free and open" about the tracking code embedded in every modern site, or the javascript blobs you get when you visit Google or Facebook. Minified/obfuscated Javascript is no different from a binary blob, except that it's much less efficient. Your chances of reverse-engineering one of those is about the same as reverse-engineering a wasm blob. Just because one is technically "human-readable" plaintext and the other binary doesn't make a difference, since you can't actually read either of them.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#40

Post by rdudekul »

duxup wrote: post #19

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…

You may like Lin Clark's posts on the subject:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webasse...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/code-cartoons/

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