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Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

#21

Post by movement »

mseepgood wrote: post #20

Is WebAssembly still a thing? It seems like it didn't really take off.

People are using it pretty regularly. I wouldn't say it's like this end all be all technology that all company's are using or something. But yea it's a viable option, probably the main feature there is, if you target wasm your code will run the same on any machine that can run a modern browser.

Give it some time, wasm, webgpu/wgpu, etc will be more and more "normal". For now they are both in use, but kind of niche.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

#22

Post by flohofwoe »

mseepgood wrote: post #20

Is WebAssembly still a thing? It seems like it didn't really take off.

Heh, of course "it's still a thing" it's even wildly successful in that it has become "just another ISA/platform" from a programmer's point of view.

Of course it can never live up to the early unrealistic hype created by business people (mainly startups chasing after VC money I guess?), but of course this was very clear to the technical people from the very beginning.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

#25

Post by exikyut »

mikevm wrote: post #9

After the move to WASM you can no longer use TCP/UDP sockets in your extensions and must rely on WebSockets/WebRTC instead, which is a shame. See https://developer.chrome.com/docs/native-client/migration/ (see the "PPB_TCPSocket and PPB_UDPSocket" section).

Uhh... um, that's cough looking to change sometime soon.

https://chromestatus.com/feature/6398297361088512

Part of me completely understands.

The other half is looking at this like a deer in⠀𝙎 𝙋 𝙄 𝘾 𝙔 ⠀ 𝙃 𝙀 𝘼 𝘿 𝙇 𝙄 𝙂 𝙃 𝙏 𝙎⠀and absolutely facepalming...

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

#26

Post by pfraze »

mseepgood wrote: post #20

Is WebAssembly still a thing? It seems like it didn't really take off.

It’s the focus of a lot of interesting experimental work, especially in the cloud. Its usefulness in the browser is slightly capped by the long download times, and the performance benefits get somewhat lost by having to message with the containing page. I still think it’s worth watching though.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

#28

Post by fb03 »

mseepgood wrote: post #20

Is WebAssembly still a thing? It seems like it didn't really take off.

Yeah it is! I've just made a game in Bevy and it compiled straight off to a 'web page' using Rust's wasm32-unknown-unknown target and wasm-bindgen to generate the bindings betweeen the wasm and js world (this is a limitation they are still working on - wasm blobs cannot directly access the DOM).

as soon as a wasm blob can directly access a webpage's DOM, you are free to use whatever language you want for your frontend, instead of JS. a pretty big deal if you ask me.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly (2017)

#29

Post by yegle »

NaCL was one of the layers of protection/isolation on App Engine runtimes.

This was one of the reasons why it took years to update even a minor point runtime update on App Engine before the so-called gen2 runtime that used gvisor as the sandbox took over.

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