How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
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How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
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Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#2Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API when running a WASM app in the browser. And there are plenty of good alternatives for the desktop already.
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#3Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
True, but we have a user-case where we have a library we could conceivably rewrite in e.g Rust and run multithreaded on the server or single-threaded inside a Webworker compiled as Wasm.
This is for a pure logic component of course
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#4Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
Calling from WASM to JS is "reasonably fast" now, of course it doesn't make any sense to make such a call for setting a single pixel, but this doesn't make sense anywhere else either.
IMHO the current main problem of WASM running in browsers is not WASM, but that most "HTML5 APIs" are too high level, too specialized, and built under the assumption that Javascript is too slow to allow lower level, more general APIs (worst example of this outdated thinking is WebAudio).
The next problem is: browser updates regularly break things, often unintended, but sometimes intended (like Chrome's splendid decision to start WebAudio contexts muted, which broke pretty much every WebAudio demo on the web).
And finally: Features behind "security gates", some features just show a passive popup - but not that different browsers could ever agree on what the best UX is for this, each one behaves differently), other features show a popup that requires a user interaction. Other feature can only be used from within in a "short-lived input event handler". Yet other features only work over a HTTPS connection. And yet other features require specific response headers to be set by the web servers (like SharedArrayBuffer support in Firefox, and probably soon-ish Chrome).
Please browser vendors I beg of you, make up your damn mind already about how to handle such security-sensitive features in a consistent way.
Then there's the always lingering deprecation threat, like WebAudio's ScriptProcessorNode, despite it working perfectly fine for situations where audio samples must be generated on the browser thread and audio synthesis can't be moved into the audio thread)
All of this combined makes the browser platform a quite frustrating platform to work on for anything that isn't very simple webpages. Not as bad as Android development (which is at the bottom of my list), but it's starting to get close.
PS: Despite my ranting, I do actually like writing WASM stuff and putting it up on the web, at least this can be done without going through hoops like on closed platforms (e.g. Android or iOS). But it really could be better. Most of the actual problems are not something the people working on WASM can do anything about though.
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#5Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
True, but we have a user-case where we have a library we could conceivably rewrite in e.g Rust and run multithreaded on the server or single-threaded inside a Webworker compiled as Wasm. This is for a pure logic component of course
Wasn't it the primary intention of WASM/Emscripten that you precisely don't have to rewrite existing libraries, but simply compile them for WASM and reuse them in the browser?
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#6Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
I think you have the performance differences backwards, wasm is usually quite a bit faster than comparable javascript. While it's true that right now there are additional overhead costs for browser APIs, that's changing, but it's also misunderstanding the value proposition of wasm. You can write an entire front end web application if you want, but it really shines for library code and computationally expensive code. And of course, the distribution benefits mentioned in the article.
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#7Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
>WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful.
I disagree.
I can already write decent C# applications that run in browser while using already existing C# libraries for e.g parsing text and it will run fine.
So, WebAssembly allows me to use existing code C# and move it to the browser while developing in my fancy language instead of Javascript and I think it (dropping js) is very solid pros
I just think tooling (visual studio, vs code, rider, etc...) around C#'s Blazor has to mature in order to make this kind of development worth considering, but I wouldnt call that "long way to go"
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#8Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
Calling from WASM to JS is "reasonably fast" now, of course it doesn't make any sense to make such a call for setting a single pixel, but this doesn't make sense anywhere else either. IMHO the current main problem of WASM running in browsers is not WASM, but that most "HTML5 APIs" are too high level, too specialized, and built under the assumption that Javascript is too slow to allow lower level, more general APIs (w…
> but this doesn't make sense anywhere else either
But that's exactly what happens when you draw into an SDL raster window. Even when you have vector drawing operations on higher level, eventually pixels are modified; you can of course combine drawing operations and transport a patch of the screen to the host, but this still goes through an impressive machinery with a lot of copying.
> All of this combined makes the browser platform a quite frustrating platform to work on for anything that isn't very simple webpages
Well, eventually we're on the same page.
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#9Despite the author's obvious enthusiasm: WASM has a long way to go before it is really useful. From my humble perspective there was not much progress since the 1.0 release. As long as every access to the host (especially the GUI) is tunneled via JavaScript, one shouldn't be surprised about the low performance and the enormous memory consumption. See what happens behind the scenes when you set a pixel in the SDL API w…
It does feel like WebAssembly development has stalled after the initial release. There are proposals for reference types, garbage collection, and host bindings that would greatly expand a WebAssembly binary's capabilities, but they haven't been implemented in any browser, much less standardized yet.
WebAssembly proposals tracker: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals
WebAssembly reference types (https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types/blob/master/p...) looks like the blocker for a lot of things, and it's in the final spec phase at least.
In Chrome, it's behind a flag since 78, which went stable in Oct 22 2019: https://chromestatus.com/features/5166497248837632 But also under active development? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=7581
Supposedly implemented in Firefox two years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444925
Nothing in Safari, of course.
Where is it now though?
Re: How WebAssembly Changes Software Distribution
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling from WASM to JS is "reasonably fast" now, of course it doesn't make any sense to make such a call for setting a single pixel, but this doesn't make sense anywhere else either. IMHO the current main problem of WASM running in browsers is not WASM, but that most "HTML5 APIs" are too high level, too specialized, and built under the assumption that Javascript is too slow to allow lower level, more general APIs (w…
> but this doesn't make sense anywhere else either But that's exactly what happens when you draw into an SDL raster window. Even when you have vector drawing operations on higher level, eventually pixels are modified; you can of course combine drawing operations and transport a patch of the screen to the host, but this still goes through an impressive machinery with a lot of copying. > All of this combined makes the…
SDL also does other weird things (or at least did), like rendering each 2D sprite in its own draw call.
The way to handle something like setting unique pixels is to keep a pixel buffer in memory on the WASM side, set the pixels in there, and then once per frame copy this pixel buffer into a WebGL texture and render this through a single WebGL draw call, or blit the pixel buffer to a 2D canvas if WebGL is not an option (also once per frame).