Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
blog.acolyer.org
Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
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Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#2WebAssembly is really going to bring some awesome fast processing for binary heavy tasks, like video and gaming, to the web. Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic.
Despite this I really get the impression a lot of non-JavaScript developers are really hoping this is some holy grail to allow them to write in their favorite language for the web platform, which WebAssembly absolutely isn't. Everything running from WASM is in an isolated sandbox. For obvious security reasons this isn't likely to change.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#3My worry is, does this make it easier for the big companies to silo the internet more completely? From a developer POV with regard to performance, this seems great, but from the standpoint of open communication, it seems problematic.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#4I wonder how this will affect Java in the long term. In the comments about the JDK9 release, there was discussion about the JVM becoming a sort of language-agnostic platform where Java is a small part. It seems WebAssembly is occupying a lot of the same space, but from a sort of opposite direction (in the sense of providing the compilation target first).
Java and the JVM obviously aren't going anywhere soon, but the history of javascript, node.js, etc. leads me to suspect WebAssembly could displace the JVM in the long term.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#5WebAssembly is really going to bring some awesome fast processing for binary heavy tasks, like video and gaming, to the web. Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic. Despite this I really get the impression a lot of non-JavaScript developers are really hoping this is some holy grail to allow them to write in their favorite language for the web platform…
> Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic.
I disagree. Flash could draw things without interacting with DOM thorough JS. Also Flash had sophisticated IDE. WebAssembly is just asm.js+ with a strong aim to compile C/C++ for the web, so you don't need to rewrite anything.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#6I wonder how this will affect Java in the long term. In the comments about the JDK9 release, there was discussion about the JVM becoming a sort of language-agnostic platform where Java is a small part. It seems WebAssembly is occupying a lot of the same space, but from a sort of opposite direction (in the sense of providing the compilation target first). Java and the JVM obviously aren't going anywhere soon, but the…
Java is a language. It comes with a standard VM, compile mechanism, and bytecode. Fortunately, the Java platform is well segmented so that the language is a separate technology from those other pieces. Scala, for example, is a language different from Java, but still targets the compile mechanism and JVM.
WebAssembly, by contrast, is not a language. It is only a bytecode and conforming container. Java could compile to WebAssembly instead of its standard bytecode and the biggest difference is execution environment. In order for WebAssembly to displace the JVM it would have to run where the JVM can run with appropriate levels of support.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#7WebAssembly is really going to bring some awesome fast processing for binary heavy tasks, like video and gaming, to the web. Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic. Despite this I really get the impression a lot of non-JavaScript developers are really hoping this is some holy grail to allow them to write in their favorite language for the web platform…
> ..., to the web
And not only. From the paper: "WebAssembly is an abstraction over modern hardware, making it language-, hardware-, and platform-independent, with use cases beyond just the Web". It could have some use in the embedded space, for securely embedding code. Java is sometimes used to sandbox code, if the WA compiler is slim enough it could be an alternative. A big difference is of course the libraries, which are not in the WA scope. But for some embedded use cases this is not a blocker: the API is there at the C level, one just need to expose it to the WA runtime (which could be automated, see SWIG and the like). A secure format, with some strong backers and high performance open source implementations has a lot of potential. I'm very curious about the footprint of the loader/compiler/runtime: it should be ok for most Linux embedded systems, but how low-end could it go as a secure ISA agnostic code distribution system?
For your second point, JavaScript is also sandboxed. On principle, there is no reason that in time the API offered to JS today won't become available to the WA runtime in the future --- although I've no idea if there's any actual work along those lines, I don't follow web front-end tech too closely.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#8WASM has the potential to change the world... a thought: while WASM will initially appear in compute-intense functions in web apps, it has the potential to be a true "Common Language Runtime". It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on.
This could be a good thing, if done correctly:
1. Desktop apps have a common, safe runtime upon which they run, and the packages can be easily distributed (and verified?) by browsers
2. "Web apps" could potentially go away - leaving web browsers for what they were intended, document sharing
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#9I love Webassembly, because It will eventually remove Javascript's dominance from the web for good.
Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
#10WebAssembly is really going to bring some awesome fast processing for binary heavy tasks, like video and gaming, to the web. Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic. Despite this I really get the impression a lot of non-JavaScript developers are really hoping this is some holy grail to allow them to write in their favorite language for the web platform…
> Despite this I really get the impression a lot of non-JavaScript developers are really hoping this is some holy grail to allow them to write in their favorite language for the web platform, which WebAssembly absolutely isn't.
Note that WebAssembly is an MVP right now. It's getting threads, SIMD, native DOM interaction, GC, which would allow many languages to compile to it and run efficiently.