Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

cultureofdevelopment.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 58 posts

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#11

Post by Longwelwind »

NickLarsen wrote: post #5
tdumitrescu wrote: post #4

Nice investigation! A minor point about your description of wasm: "WebAssembly or wasm is a bytecode specification for writing performant, browser agnostic web components." The term "web components" already has a pretty specific meaning referring to the in-progress specs for custom html ui elements and surrounding technologies (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components ). You probably don't want…

That's fair. Originally asm.js was named capsule.js but that was taken and didn't really mean what it was. We could also call it modules but there is another very related spec out there for that as well. What would you call it instead?

I believe "module" in classic Javascript already corresponds to a "self-contained" Javascript file.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#12

Post by SiVal »

NickLarsen wrote: post #5
tdumitrescu wrote: post #4

Nice investigation! A minor point about your description of wasm: "WebAssembly or wasm is a bytecode specification for writing performant, browser agnostic web components." The term "web components" already has a pretty specific meaning referring to the in-progress specs for custom html ui elements and surrounding technologies (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components ). You probably don't want…

That's fair. Originally asm.js was named capsule.js but that was taken and didn't really mean what it was. We could also call it modules but there is another very related spec out there for that as well. What would you call it instead?

code components?

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#13

Post by flamedoge »

benkuykendall wrote: post #8

Huh, the AST looks pretty human readable. Anyone have tips for writing WebAssembly without using asm.js? Even a pointer to decent documentation would be great.

github.com/WebAssembly/sexpr-wasm-prototype

github.com/WebAssembly/spec

github.com/WebAssembly/design

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#14

Post by dreamsofdragons »

tdumitrescu wrote: post #4

Nice investigation! A minor point about your description of wasm: "WebAssembly or wasm is a bytecode specification for writing performant, browser agnostic web components." The term "web components" already has a pretty specific meaning referring to the in-progress specs for custom html ui elements and surrounding technologies (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components ). You probably don't want…

It's already a confusing mess, and you aren't getting that genie back in the bottle. "Web Assembly Component" would probably be the best compromise.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#15

Post by vonklaus »

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use.

Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy and has poor documentation. I am curious who web assembly is for and who is really excited about it. Is it gaining traction in gaming, and also what am I missing(serious)?

edit: Can advertisers bypass content blockers by compiling to wasm?

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#16

Post by aphextron »

vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

The idea is that we will be able to write web applications in a sane, proper language like C# or similar, and then compile to Web Assembly. I, for one, embrace this idea whole heartedly.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#17

Post by vonklaus »

aphextron wrote: post #16
vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

The idea is that we will be able to write web applications in a sane, proper language like C# or similar, and then compile to Web Assembly. I, for one, embrace this idea whole heartedly.

I can respect that. However, my point is, are you a web developer who primarily writes code for the web at your day job. Anecdotally, I haven't seen a lot of overlap between people writing web applications and C# developers. I have seen a lot of C family devs think this is awesome, but have no plans to actually develop directly for the front-end web.

edit: the first major demonstration was Unity's angry bots according to Wikipedia. So it appears this is for game devs, and game developers who want to build for the browser will be excited about this. I just think webassembly to be really far down on the ist of improvements we should make to the browser.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#18

Post by NickLarsen »

vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

We (at Stack Overflow) have a new documentation product coming down the pipe with an emphasis on examples and I thought it would be awesome if we could expand our stack snippets feature to languages beyond javascript. A reproducible example right there on the webpage. In researching existing solutions, nothing was satisfying, and then I had the idea to just use asm.js and write an MSIL interpreter. I spoke with some people familiar with asm.js and decided that it wasn't particularly difficult, but it had a ton of limitations from js file sizes to ways to get all of the libraries people ask about uploaded, and of course regular breaking changes in the browser. Wasm seemed like it could help with some of the issues being a formal web specification with representatives from multiple browsers.

Other than that, I can see a lot of uses for it, from small neural nets in the browser to high performance applications like photo editing, and of course gaming. It might not be for all applications, but it certainly has a spot.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#19

Post by vonklaus »

NickLarsen wrote: post #18
vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

We (at Stack Overflow) have a new documentation product coming down the pipe with an emphasis on examples and I thought it would be awesome if we could expand our stack snippets feature to languages beyond javascript. A reproducible example right there on the webpage. In researching existing solutions, nothing was satisfying, and then I had the idea to just use asm.js and write an MSIL interpreter. I spoke with some…

Nick,

Great writeup. I am a big proponent of the idea of webassembly as I believe many are. The browser is one of the greatest apps, and it is easy to look past many of its flaws because it provides a universal environment to develop for. I have always been a harsh critic of the balkanization apps provide when they are unneccessarily trying to extend functionality already provided by the browser and live natively on my device providing virtually nothing but more access to "my" resources.

That said, while I don't love writing apps in an old IBM GML and pulling in heaps of scripts to get the functionality I need, it is easy and well understood (which is why it has proliferated). If we are to change this, I think an entirely new paradigm would be easier to use and embrace than something like wasm because the browser has a lot of access to resources and this has a fairly narrow use-case relative to it's complexity.

I could be wrong, as this technology is super nascent and people as intelligent and synonomous with the web like BRendan Eich are openly supporting it, I just don't see it being embraced at the sort of tipping point neccessary to proliferate.

It will be very hard to build a community of people doing things like you have here: providing great resources and tutorials and a community of code base to build on. A new standard or tech must be 10x better than the current one and I do not feel this is.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#20

Post by [deleted] »

NickLarsen wrote: post #18
vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

We (at Stack Overflow) have a new documentation product coming down the pipe with an emphasis on examples and I thought it would be awesome if we could expand our stack snippets feature to languages beyond javascript. A reproducible example right there on the webpage. In researching existing solutions, nothing was satisfying, and then I had the idea to just use asm.js and write an MSIL interpreter. I spoke with some…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN