Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
mofi.loud.red
Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
1–10 of 68 posts
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#2Interesting article, but it's lacking a performance comparison between wasm and javascript running in workers.
JS can be largely fast enough for a lot of use cases: if I had some WebAssembly to a project I need a good reason to do so.
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#3I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.
I don't want to speak to this example too deeply because I don't know it (I see they're doing all sorts of stuff with audio so maybe they do need WebAssembly) but modern JavaScript VMs are very, very fast. 99% of webapps are absolutely fine using JavaScript.
The far more important part of making snappy UIs is the Web Worker aspect. To my mind it's one of the key reasons native apps feel so much better than web ones: it's trivial to move an operation off the main thread, do an expensive calculation and then trivial to bring it back to the main thread again. Unfortuately the API for doing so on the web is extremely clunky, passing messages back and forth between a page context and a worker context. I'd recommend anyone thinking about this stuff to take a look at Comlink:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/comlink
it lets you wrap a lot of this complication up in simple promises, though you still have to think hard about what code lives inside a worker and what does not. In my ideal world all the code would live in the same place and we'd be freely exchanging stuff like you can in Swift. "Don't do it on the main thread" feels like a mantra taught to every new native developer as soon as it can be, the same discipline simply doesn't exist on the web. But neither do the required higher level language features/APIs.
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#4I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. I don't want to speak to this example too deeply because I don't know it (I see they're doing all sorts of stuff with audio so maybe they do need WebAssembly) but modern JavaScript VMs are very, very fast. 99% of webapps are absolutely f…
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Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#5Interesting article, but it's lacking a performance comparison between wasm and javascript running in workers. JS can be largely fast enough for a lot of use cases: if I had some WebAssembly to a project I need a good reason to do so.
https://takahirox.github.io/WebAssembly-benchmark/
JS can be faster in enough cases where it's worthwhile to test.
WASM is mostly being used for code that has already been written and is now being integrated into a web site. I wouldn't suggest jumping right to WASM simply for performance.
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#6I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. I don't want to speak to this example too deeply because I don't know it (I see they're doing all sorts of stuff with audio so maybe they do need WebAssembly) but modern JavaScript VMs are very, very fast. 99% of webapps are absolutely f…
>I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.
The Figma team would say differently. For 99% of CRUD app use cases you are absolutely correct. But WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago.
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#7I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. I don't want to speak to this example too deeply because I don't know it (I see they're doing all sorts of stuff with audio so maybe they do need WebAssembly) but modern JavaScript VMs are very, very fast. 99% of webapps are absolutely f…
>I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. The Figma team would say differently. For 99% of CRUD app use cases you are absolutely correct. But WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago.
It's an impressive app but I as the parent said, I'd expect JS would have worked just fine & let you do all the same things, at essentially the same speed.
The key differentiation, as the parent says, is using Web Workers to make sure you're not doing work on the main thread.
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#8I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. I don't want to speak to this example too deeply because I don't know it (I see they're doing all sorts of stuff with audio so maybe they do need WebAssembly) but modern JavaScript VMs are very, very fast. 99% of webapps are absolutely f…
>I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. The Figma team would say differently. For 99% of CRUD app use cases you are absolutely correct. But WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago.
asm.js was capable of most of the same stuff, wasm just takes it further (with simd and native int64)
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#9I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. I don't want to speak to this example too deeply because I don't know it (I see they're doing all sorts of stuff with audio so maybe they do need WebAssembly) but modern JavaScript VMs are very, very fast. 99% of webapps are absolutely f…
>I'm fascinated by WebAssembly and love that it exists but if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. The Figma team would say differently. For 99% of CRUD app use cases you are absolutely correct. But WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago.
> But WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago.
Like what?
Re: Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers
#10I would caution anyone looking to make their UI "snappy": while webassembly performance for things like raw compute - especially with simd - is superior, any time you need to interface with browser APIs like the DOM to update your UI you're now going to pay a bunch of interop costs that aren't present in native JavaScript. For some workloads this will make wasm meaningfully slower - especially ones that use strings.