41–50 of 86 posts
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As is mentioned in the article, u64 was used to future proof for wasm's upcoming memory64 type: https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/blob/master/proposal...
Yeah, so what are they going to do when they then claim to need to to represent the length 2^64?
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I, on the other hand, wish everyone would embrace 32 bit by default. Doubling the size of every index, integer, etc comes at significant memory cost for next to no benefit. Increasing the amount of memory used directly impacts performance considering how slow memory is and how important it is to keep commonly used items in cache. If you're seriously using more than 4gb in a web page... I wouldn't mind a non-default w…
On some platforms like ARM, the transition from 32bit to 64bit(Aarch64) and the improvements to the ISA allowed some software to run much quicker on the same hardware. While the increased memory usage was detrimental if you are running into memory pressure issues, the speed improvements would be well worth the change for most tasks. When the Pi 3 launched it had a 32bit OS, but switching to 64bit improved the speed f…
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I'm 39 and I don't get it.
I assume it's from when you used to boot DOS mode games that addressed beyond 640KB conventional memory they had DOS/4GW labeled all over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/4G
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> Doubling the size of every index, integer, etc comes at significant memory cost for next to no benefit. The overwhelming majority of GUI program data is composed of images, textures, sounds, videos, 3D models, text, etc. I would bet that less than 5% of the memory required to host a popular web page (facebook, amazon, etc.) is dedicated to pointers, array indices, etc.
You are probably right about the heap, but in the stack there are no big data structures. To move all data types to 64bits would impact the stack size of processes and threads. Bigger data structures also mean more cache misses. So, systems would be also slower. As, bringing data from memory to the CPU is very slow compared with accessing L1 or L2 cached data. So, you have a point. But, it does not apply equally to a…
Ok, now let's say 32 bit integers are the standard: You either wrote a program that starts to fail in mysterious ways when someone runs it on a 2 GB file, or you complicated the hell out of your data structures by needing arrays of arrays (i.e. https://www.nayuki.io/page/large-arrays-proposal-for-java).
It should be easier to make correct programs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Doubling the size of every index, integer, etc comes at significant memory cost for next to no benefit. The overwhelming majority of GUI program data is composed of images, textures, sounds, videos, 3D models, text, etc. I would bet that less than 5% of the memory required to host a popular web page (facebook, amazon, etc.) is dedicated to pointers, array indices, etc.
The overwhelming majority of what wasm will be used for probably does not include images, textures, sounds, videos or 3d models. The overwhelming majority of the memory in most wasm programs will probably be not large arrays of text. The webpage as a whole is a gui program, but wasm is primarily a place to run computationally intensive code. The web-browser deals with things like rendering images natively without sto…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, on the other hand, wish everyone would embrace 32 bit by default. Doubling the size of every index, integer, etc comes at significant memory cost for next to no benefit. Increasing the amount of memory used directly impacts performance considering how slow memory is and how important it is to keep commonly used items in cache. If you're seriously using more than 4gb in a web page... I wouldn't mind a non-default w…
> Doubling the size of every index, integer, etc comes at significant memory cost for next to no benefit. The overwhelming majority of GUI program data is composed of images, textures, sounds, videos, 3D models, text, etc. I would bet that less than 5% of the memory required to host a popular web page (facebook, amazon, etc.) is dedicated to pointers, array indices, etc.
I wish new platforms would embrace 64 bit as the default. C and C++ for all common platforms use 32 bit literals and prefer 32 bit operations (char * short => int). Rust made a similar mistake. Java arrays use 32 bit subscripts, etc... I don't have a single computer (including my phone) using 32 bit pointers, but integers are stuck in the late 80s. (We already had 64 bit DEC alphas in the early 90s) For a web page, 4…
That said I think we need some sort of user-facing permissions constraints for memory usage and/or webassembly execution. I fear that in practice this new capacity will mostly get used by unscrupulous crypto-miners.
So, will we need to have 4GB of ram to run Javascripts now? :)
If we start playing crossplatform, browser-based wasm games[0], we might. And we should. OS independence when. 0: https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/
Most games are already cross-platform. No need to make them slower, less efficient.
I wish new platforms would embrace 64 bit as the default. C and C++ for all common platforms use 32 bit literals and prefer 32 bit operations (char * short => int). Rust made a similar mistake. Java arrays use 32 bit subscripts, etc... I don't have a single computer (including my phone) using 32 bit pointers, but integers are stuck in the late 80s. (We already had 64 bit DEC alphas in the early 90s) For a web page, 4…
Cache isn't infinite.
Amazing that they have a dark mode detection on that website.
You can do that in CSS now. I've noticed surprisingly many sites adjusting when I started using a Windows machine and set my system-wide preference to dark mode.