WebAssembly Studio • Hacker News Board

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#61

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #58

Something similar but also totally different is https://makepad.nl/ - a graphics programming IDE in Rust, for Rust, targeting the browser. It's a totally different use case but there's some similarities, somehow, anyway. Unlike this app, its actually all WASM and the author frequently tweets about how he feels more productive building a web UI in Rust than he would HTML+CSS+JS. And you can say what you want, the thin…

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#62

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #43

mrspeaker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you know it was a webasm IDE if it's just a blank page? (I thought it was going to be a music DAW when I clicked the link)

The url is webassembly.studio and the title is WebAssembly Studio

Even if you correctly pick up on the implications of "studio", it could also be a page about WebAssembly Studio or the page where you download it.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#63

Post by zamadatix » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #55

zamadatix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why assume ignorance/difficulty when the reality is not everyone is going to focus on adding/maintaining accessibility when they haven't even built out their beta MIT licensed side project? It'd certainly be nice if everything just automagically worked about accessible UI but we're not there yet (getting anything to automagically work in UI is a pain still). As far as what we can do about it I suppose outside of some…

Users with accessibility needs deserve to be able to use software as much as any of the rest of us do, and we should pride ourselves in making time to address their needs. Try reading your comment from the perspective of someone who is unable to use this software because of the choices you've made. Someday, perhaps sooner than you think, you might find yourself in their shoes. In this case, mwcampbell refers to a spe…

I agree that if we make something we intend for others to use it should aim to be accessible to others. Nobody here is saying others shouldn't be able to use software the problem is software is never complete and for a project like this getting the thing working may reasonably happen before you add ARIA attributes without the cause being enmity to others.

I might be missing something, how would it have been easier to make by adding additional ARIA markup to the UI?

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#64

Post by skrebbel » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

spicybright wrote: post #57

skrebbel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is a good starting point for developers who want to get better at this? For example, do you know of a good way for developers with no disabilities to get an impression of how a site works in various screen readers?

The accessibility mode in the firefox debugger is a good start.

Wow nice! I feel pretty stupid for just having looked over that all the time. It comes pretty close to what I hoped to get.

I do see some surprising behavior though, eg I ran it on WhatsApp Web, where it complains about image links that have no `alt`. But these links do have a `title`. Wouldn't every screen reader fall back to the `title` when there's no `alt`? What I mean is, is that an actual issue or just a "satisfy the tool" level thing to fix? I'm not sure how people build up an intuition for stuff like this, any suggestions?

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#65

Post by the_duke » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #45

Question for anyone with real WASM experience: what are your top recommended entry points / reference materials? AssemblyScript seems pretty approachable at 1st glance...

Rust has the best tooling for wasm and is easiest to get started with, in my opinion.

`rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown`

`cargo build --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown`

Is all you need to compile a Rust library to a `.wasm` file. (almost, you also need a setting in Cargo.toml: [lib] crate-type = ["cdylib", "rlib"] )

In the browser you can get access to DOM apis via web-sys.

The documentation has quite a lot of examples and info: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/web-sys/index.html

wasm-pack (https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack) makes building code for the browser easy.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#66

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #45

Question for anyone with real WASM experience: what are your top recommended entry points / reference materials? AssemblyScript seems pretty approachable at 1st glance...

AssemblyScript is one of the best options, because if the only thing you care about is some high level language that outputs WebAssembly, then you are still using Web related tools.

Then D is quite easy to use (LDC alongside betterC mode, runtime is still not fully ported).

Followed by TinyGo, Rust, C#, Nim.

I would leave Emscripten, C and C++, only for porting existing code into the Web, as even with the sandbox memory corruptions of data allocated in the linear memory blocks are susceptible to occur.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#67

Post by tom_mellior » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

Huh. I created a C project, added #include and printf("hello world") to the skeleton. "Build & Run" doesn't seem to do anything but compile and print the not very useful message of "[error]: TypeError: second argument must be an object".

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#68

Post by mwcampbell » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

plussed_reader wrote: post #60

crisnoble wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`appearance: none;` gets you a long way

But muh ableist design preferences....

Please avoid this kind of unconstructive snark. I'm prone to it myself when discussing this subject, but I try to avoid it when discussing accessibility with a broad audience like HN. I want to meet mainstream developers where they are, figure out what prevents them from making their applications accessible, and do something about it, not just guilt-trip them.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#69

Post by brundolf » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

tomasreimers wrote: post #2

Jokes about the [Birth and Death of JavaScript]( https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... ) aside, I love the concept of WASM and that we're making the web a more robust compile target. One of the big limitations in my mind is that I still don't know of that many people using it in production at scale. Is there a list, or well known set of examples (other than Figma), who are using WASM in prod…

The problem is that it's hard to use as a primary language because of a lack of direct Web API access. So basically right now it's not a casual decision to say "I prefer X over JS, so I'll just use that instead because it targets WASM!" Because there's this enormous cost of crossing that API barrier (which means you'll be using some JS regardless, directly or indirectly).

So for now the value-proposition only really makes sense for a fairly narrow subset of projects: mostly ones where client-side pure-compute is a bottleneck. Theoretically API access is being worked on, but I think it's still a ways out.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#70

Post by dboreham » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

tomasreimers wrote: post #2

Jokes about the [Birth and Death of JavaScript]( https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... ) aside, I love the concept of WASM and that we're making the web a more robust compile target. One of the big limitations in my mind is that I still don't know of that many people using it in production at scale. Is there a list, or well known set of examples (other than Figma), who are using WASM in prod…

I'm also intrigued by the possibilities of WebAssembly. However I also have a nagging feeling "didn't we already do this with Java, 20 years ago?". Wondering what's different this time, or is this just a MySpace vs Facebook second-times-the-charm thing.