Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#2Just a remark: if you want to play with WASM features like GC, use Binaryen's `wasm-opt` instead of WABT, as `wasm-opt` supports way more WASM extensions.
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#3Pretty cool.
I haven't really explored WASM hands-on (I'll give this guide a try) but, given that it's already been a few years, I think it's been hugely beneficial for web development.
Not the "JavaScript killer" some where hoping for, though it was never meant to be one. Instead it integrates pretty nicely within the existing ecosystem, optimizing existing use-cases and allowing new ones when heavy computations are required. Net benefit for all web devs - faster libraries, impressive dev tools and more portable node binaries.
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#4Gave WASM a try and ran into problems exposing connections to a SQLite database I wanted to connect to locally. Has anyone done something like that before and can point to good resources?
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#5While it's an interesting (and effective) approach to learn something, what is the point of learning WebAssembly? After all, I thought that WASM was supposed to be something like "LLVM for web", a low-level IR for webdev languages to target and for browsers to execute efficiently, and not something that you'd write manually. Or am I wrong?
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#6While it's an interesting (and effective) approach to learn something, what is the point of learning WebAssembly? After all, I thought that WASM was supposed to be something like "LLVM for web", a low-level IR for webdev languages to target and for browsers to execute efficiently, and not something that you'd write manually. Or am I wrong?
Some reasons to understand the textual representation, besides curiousity:
You are embedding a WASM engine and want to better grok how the import or exporting works.
You are writing a compiler that targets WASM.
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#7While it's an interesting (and effective) approach to learn something, what is the point of learning WebAssembly? After all, I thought that WASM was supposed to be something like "LLVM for web", a low-level IR for webdev languages to target and for browsers to execute efficiently, and not something that you'd write manually. Or am I wrong?
Author here!
My initial motivation to learn WASM (as someone from a primarily web background) was that I had a pretty poor understanding of WASM in general and so I had a lot of difficulty working with WASM builds in just about any capacity other than a heavy JS wrapper.
There are aspects to how WASM works that are quite different from other kinds of assembly formats that make learning the basics pretty important. e.g. how memory is requested, provided, grown. How functions are received and exported. Capabilities of tables.
A lot of this might be abstracted by massive wrappers, but you're losing a lot in perf and debugability when using them.
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#8While it's an interesting (and effective) approach to learn something, what is the point of learning WebAssembly? After all, I thought that WASM was supposed to be something like "LLVM for web", a low-level IR for webdev languages to target and for browsers to execute efficiently, and not something that you'd write manually. Or am I wrong?
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Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#9While it's an interesting (and effective) approach to learn something, what is the point of learning WebAssembly? After all, I thought that WASM was supposed to be something like "LLVM for web", a low-level IR for webdev languages to target and for browsers to execute efficiently, and not something that you'd write manually. Or am I wrong?
Sometimes you may need to debug the actual wasm code or understand what the compiler is outputting. Depending on the flags you set during compilation, you may want to optimize for size of binary or for performance. You may also want to compare the wasm produced by two different languages or different versions of the language compiler. Maybe you want to verify what libraries are actually getting bundled with your wasm.
Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
#10Pretty cool. I haven't really explored WASM hands-on (I'll give this guide a try) but, given that it's already been a few years, I think it's been hugely beneficial for web development. Not the "JavaScript killer" some where hoping for, though it was never meant to be one. Instead it integrates pretty nicely within the existing ecosystem, optimizing existing use-cases and allowing new ones when heavy computations are…
I've been watching WASM from afar, and it's my understanding that it's not a JS killer because it doesn't have direct access to the DOM or to most DOM APIs. I'm curious if there's another reason I'm missing?