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WebAssembly Studio

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Re: WebAssembly Studio

#81

Post by xingyzt »

zamadatix wrote: post #63
ddevault wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The clickable divs should be focusable and have the aria button role. ...

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#82

Post by austincummings »

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…

Twitch also appears to be using it, although I don't know what for.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#84

Post by TheRealPomax »

dboreham wrote: post #70
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.

For one, no one needs to install WASM, nor are they going to run into versioning issues because the OS has a hard dependency on it. Every single person with a computer, from a smart phone to render farm workstations, will have WASM support because those devices will have a browser. The only browser that doesn't support it is the legacy IE line of browsers, of which only 11 is still supported, and which only runs on systems that will happily run Edge, instead.

Devs can rely on the fact that users won't need to install a single thing, and users can rely on the fact that they're not going to have to go through the insanity that is "trying to install the right version of Boobletech(tm) Meep(r)" or, hell: "trying to get their OS to even acknowledge that the preinstalled version of java is over a decade old and it needs to stop using it instead of the new version you installed".

If your compiler can target WebAssembly, and your users are on computers with operating systems that are still supported, your WASM application will work for them, because everyone has a browser.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#85

Post by jayflux »

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 know the Birth and death of JS gets mentioned quite a lot in WASM context (even as a joke) but I really don't see that being the case. Most web applications/sites are simple, and won't need to be compiled at a lower level in order to work. On average JS developers will be cheaper than C/C++/Rust developers to hire, so I don't see shops changing their personnel or stack anytime soon, especially if the job is to knock up a website that's a bit interactive.

It simply won't be viable to have low-level engineers do things like "build a dropdown nav" or "make an interactive carousel", and these sort of tasks will always be around.

WASM is there to augment JS in places JS isn't suitable for, rather than outright replace it. JS will definitely still exist.

To answer your Q there's also a comprehensive list of projects using Web Assembly on this site: https://madewithwebassembly.com/all-projects

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#86

Post by simonh »

zamadatix wrote: post #48
mwcampbell wrote: post #10

The "Create New Project" dialog has serious accessibility problems when used with a screen reader. The buttons are clickable divs, not actual HTML buttons or even marked up with proper ARIA. I haven't yet ventured any further into the app. Given that the app is a WebAssembly development environment, my first guess was that it was built in WebAssembly itself, with a custom UI framework. But in fact, it's plain React,…

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…

What does being MIT licensed have to do with it? And please, don't anyone dare chime in with the the standard "if people want a feature in open source they can 'simply' implement it themselves".

UI technologies that don't include accessibility are simply not good enough. It's not like accessible options don't exist.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#87

Post by joshjhargreaves »

clickness wrote: post #78
mwcampbell wrote: post #10

The "Create New Project" dialog has serious accessibility problems when used with a screen reader. The buttons are clickable divs, not actual HTML buttons or even marked up with proper ARIA. I haven't yet ventured any further into the app. Given that the app is a WebAssembly development environment, my first guess was that it was built in WebAssembly itself, with a custom UI framework. But in fact, it's plain React,…

I read your comment as unnecessarily abrasive, self-entitled almost. > "It breaks my heart that when this project was started in 2017, some 20 years after web accessibility advocacy had started in earnest, the developer was still uninformed enough about accessibility that they would create a custom button component with no ARIA support." You're assuming ignorance and malice, when in all actuality this most likely com…

It's almost as if some people get off on the feeling of self-importance they get for 'calling people out' in this manner- the neckbeards of accessibility. In an ideal world, accessibility would come for free - but unfortunately it does not.

Yes I would argue that morally projects should do their best to support it - but even at well established companies it takes significant resources to maintain accessibility. Yes in this case it may be as simple as using native Buttons, as the above comment said, 'that's as far as I got'. Just pretending that accessibility isn't a significant time an resources doesn't make it any less so. If this wasn't true then there wouldn't be legislation to essentially address this market-failure.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#88

Post by tadfisher »

dboreham wrote: post #70
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.

The difference is that wasm is designed to be sandboxed, instead of the JVM which was designed to normalize disparate computing environments. In practice, this entails a lot of work to create runtimes to do anything interesting in wasm, but the behavior is secure by default (ignoring side-channel attacks, of course). Java applets run in a sandbox by default, of course, but the JRE itself has unmitigated access to the host system, so the security boundary isn't as well defined. Users can also be tricked to trust malicious applets, which is a built-in mechanism to escape the sandbox; browsers hopefully will not provide this feature for their wasm runtimes.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#89

Post by yodalf »

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...

Embedded engineer here.

We used it to implement a complex, browser-accessible debugger interface for an industrial analyser device. Fast real-time graphs, buttons, menus, etc...

It typically loads in a few seconds in your browser. Works wonders.

We used emscripten + imgui + implot ... All C++ and zero interaction with the low-level WASM itself.

Recommended.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#90

Post by echeese »

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…

Google Earth: https://earth.google.com/web/
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