Having wasm 3.0 and a project named wasm3 which doesn't seem to support wasm 3.0 is sure going to get confusing!
WASM 3.0 Completed
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Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish the same mate, Please wasm team, I am more than happy waiting 3 years if you can guarantee that you are looking into the best way possible into integrating this feature of dom manipulation. I sometimes feel like js is too magic-y, I want plain boring golang and want to write some dom functions without using htmx preferably. Please give us more freedom! This might be the most requested feature and this was how…
I was even trying to be charitable and read the feature list for elements that would thin down a third party DOM access layer, but other than the string changes I’m just not seeing it. That’s not enough forward progress. WASM is just an extremely expensive toy for browsers until it supports DOM access.
My old team shipped a web port of our 3D modeling software back in 2017. The entire engine is the same as the desktop app, written in C++, and compiled to wasm.
Wasm is not now and will never be a magic "press here to replace JS with a new language" button. But it works really well for bringing systems software into a web environment.
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#93[flagged]
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
i don't see the reduced development effort, after all, unless the language is only running on webassembly i still need to implement my own GC for other CPUs. so most GC-languages being ported to webassembly already have a GC, so what is the benefit of using a provided GC then? on the other hand i see GC as a feature that could become part of any modern CPU. then the benefit would be large, as any language could use i…
> i don't see the reduced development effort, after all, unless the language is only running on webassembly i still need to implement my own GC for other CPUs. I'd think porting an existing GC to WASM is more effort than using WASM's GC for a GC'd language?
i don't think so. first of all, you don't rewrite your code for every CPU but you just adapt some specific things. most code is just compiled for the new architecture and runs. second, those languages that are already running on wasm have already done the work. so at best new languages who haven't been ported yet will get any benefit from a reduced porting effort.
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That old thing again ;) Direct DOM access doesn't make any sense as a WASM feature. It would be at best a web-browser feature which browser vendors need to implement outside of WASM (by defining a standardized C-API which maps to the DOM JS API and exposing that C API directly to WASM via the function import table - but that idea is exactly as horrible in practice as it sounds in theory). If you need to manipulate th…
WASM is an abbreviation for WebAssembly . If it doesn't have DOM access, WebAssembly is as related to the Web as JavaScript is to Java. A language ecosystem with no I/O capability is as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.
Well, arguably the worst thing about WASM is the naming.
It's neither directly related to the web, nor is it an assembly syntax.
It's just another virtual ISA. "Direct DOM access for WASM" makes about as much sense as "direct C++ stdlib access for the x86 instruction set" - none ;)
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#96Does WASM still have 64 KiB pages? I get why for desktops, but there are use-cases for running WASM on microcontrollers where that's either inconvenient or outright impossible. The one in particular I have in mind would be to put WASM on graphical calculators, in order to have a more secure alternative to the ASM programs (it's possible nowadays to write in higher-level languages, but the term stuck) that could work…
https://github.com/WebAssembly/custom-page-sizes is a proposal championed by my colleague to add single byte granularity to Wasm page sizes, motivated by embedded systems and many other use cases where 64kb is excessive. It is implemented in wasmtime, and a Firefox implementation is in progress.
> Allow Wasm to better target resource-constrained embedded environments, including those with less than 64 KiB memory available.
If it has less than 64 kB of memory how is it going to run a WASM runtime anyway?
And even cheap microcontrollers tend to have more than 64 kB of memory these days. Doesn't not seem remotely worth the complexity.
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#97I'm definitely excited to see 64 bit as a default part of the spec. A lot of web apps have been heavily restricted by this, in particular any online video editors. We see a bunch of restrictions due to the 32 bit cap today here at Figma. One thing I'm curious though is whether mobile devices will keep their addressable per-tab memory cap the same. It's often OS defined rather than tied to the 32 bit space.
Unfortunately, Memory64 comes with a significant performance penalty because the wasm runtime has to check bounds (which wasn't necessary on 32-bit as the runtime would simply allocate the full 4GB of address space every time).
But if you really need more than 4GB of memory, then sure, go ahead and use it.
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#98On gc: > Wasm GC is low-level as well: a compiler targeting Wasm can declare the memory layout of its runtime data structures in terms of struct and array types, plus unboxed tagged integers, whose allocation and lifetime is then handled by Wasm. There's already a lot misunderstandings about wasm, and I fear that people will just go "It supports GC, so we can just export python/java/c#/go etc." This is not a silver b…
Wasm-GC are abstractions for compiler writers to enable GC dependent languages to run without shipping a GC to run inside the already GC'd browser/Wasm heap and instead just use the browser GC directly. So yes, Java,C#,etc will work better (If you look at the horrible mess the current C# WASM export generates it basically ships with an inner platform containing a GC), and no, it will explicitly not speak with "javasc…
C# cannot be compiled to WASM GC yet: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77.
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#99Since it hasn't been mentioned here yet: I wonder if the multiple-memories feature will somehow allow to avoid the extra copy that's currently needed when mapping a WebGPU resource. This mapping is available in a separate ArrayBuffer object which isn't accessible from WASM without calling into JS and then copying from the ArrayBuffer into the WASM heap and back. Multiple WASM memories and Clang's/LLVM's address space…
There has been a discussion (https://github.com/WebAssembly/multi-memory/issues/45) on the toolchain support, but I'm not sure if there have been steps to use multiple address spaces to support Wasm multi-memory in LLVM yet.
Re: WASM 3.0 Completed
#100Still no mention of DOM. See you all for WASM 4.0.
That old thing again ;) Direct DOM access doesn't make any sense as a WASM feature. It would be at best a web-browser feature which browser vendors need to implement outside of WASM (by defining a standardized C-API which maps to the DOM JS API and exposing that C API directly to WASM via the function import table - but that idea is exactly as horrible in practice as it sounds in theory). If you need to manipulate th…
> If you need to manipulate the DOM - just do that in JS, calling from WASM into JS is cheap, and JS is surprisingly fast too.
From the point of view of someone who doesn't do web development at all, and to whom JS seems entirely cryptic: This argument is weird. Why is this specific (seemingly extremely useful!) "web thing" guarded by a specific language? Why would something with the generality and wide scope of WASM relegate that specific useful thing to a particular language? A language that, in the context of what WASM wants to do in making the web "just another platform", is pretty niche (for any non-web-person)?
For me, as a non-web-person, the big allure of WASM is the browser as "just another platform". The one web-specific thing that seems sensible to keep is the DOM. But if manipulating that requires learning web-specific languages, then so be it, I'll just grab a canvas and paint everything myself. I think we give up something if we start going that route.