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WebAssembly Playground

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Re: WebAssembly Playground

#11

Post by SeanAnderson »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

shrug It finds its uses. It's just not that overstated.

sandspiel is quite popular and is built using WASM: https://sandspiel.club/

Google Earth - https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/webassembly-brings-google-...

Ruffle (the "make Flash run safely" tool) - https://ruffle.rs/

Ableton's Learning Synths - https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

etc etc. It's just hard to tell when something is using WASM when it "just works" and is indistinguishable from optimized JavaScript

(cough also my WIP game is being built in WASM.Rust, https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants I've been enjoying the experience!)

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#12

Post by modeless »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

I bet it is used in a lot of ways people don't notice. In my site[1] I use wasm to run an ancient piece of code called SGP4 to propagate satellite orbits, but it's totally invisible to the user. Someone actually ported SGP4 to JavaScript but it's slower and the results don't perfectly match the original, so it's great to have the option to run the real C version (actually the original is Fortran but the C port is the standard these days).

[1] https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#13

Post by jb1991 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

From what I understand, it’s still pretty clunky to do multithreading with it. So people who want the speed of near native execution often also want extra threads.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#14

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #4
csjh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass adoption in what way? What benefit does the average CRUD web app gain from using some form of WebAssembly?

To incorporate something currently is only available in "native" program form is what I am thinking; like ffmpeg example above.

Yes, but WASM does not solve a problém which (many) people have. Of course there are some applications, like online image or video editors.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#15

Post by anoopelias »

csjh wrote: post #3
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

Mass adoption in what way? What benefit does the average CRUD web app gain from using some form of WebAssembly?

Not sure if WASM is there yet, but maybe the crud app can be built using a programming language that the developer prefers? Like Java, C#, Go, Rust, C++, whatever instead of JavaScript/TypeScript?

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#16

Post by vinnymac »

iamcreasy wrote: post #6
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

To piggyback this question - do developers have to find another way to access/update DOM update if using webassembly for web development?

At the moment you need to send state between WebAssembly and JS contexts in order to manipulate the DOM.

> By itself, WebAssembly cannot currently directly access the DOM; it can only call JavaScript, passing in integer and floating point primitive data types. Thus, to access any Web API, WebAssembly needs to call out to JavaScript, which then makes the Web API call. Emscripten therefore creates the HTML and JavaScript glue code needed to achieve this.

> Note: There are future plans to allow WebAssembly to call Web APIs directly.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Concept...

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#17

Post by baudaux »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

There are a lot of projects around WebAssembly. But technology is hidden from external view. (Some self promotion, I am creating https://exaequos.com, a new Unix like OS running in a web browser)

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#18

Post by billti »

anoopelias wrote: post #15
csjh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass adoption in what way? What benefit does the average CRUD web app gain from using some form of WebAssembly?

Not sure if WASM is there yet, but maybe the crud app can be built using a programming language that the developer prefers? Like Java, C#, Go, Rust, C++, whatever instead of JavaScript/TypeScript?

Yeah, we took a bet that writing our compiler, simulator, etc. in Rust and architecting correctly so it could compile to native and WASM would let us run native and in the browser too, and we’re pretty thrilled with how it turned out.

We just shipped 1.0, but this slightly older blog post goes into the architecture a bit more: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/introducing-the-azure-...

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#19

Post by srvaroa »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

There are usages outside of the browser too. We are using wasm as a runtime for applications and modules deployed in small IoT device. Wasm helps overcome the typical limitations of those devices giving platform independence, sandboxed environments, ability to verify and sign modules ahead of deployment, allows developers to program in dominant languages and compile to wasm, and still retain a low footprint which is critical in this context.

There is a more detailed overview here: https://www.midokura.com/why-webassembly-is-perfect-for-tiny...

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#20

Post by emnudge »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

I sunk a decent amount of time into WebAssembly over the past few months (I am the author of "watlings").

From my understanding, there are 3 answers here.

1. Most spaces do not need WASM. You don't necessarily see speed improvements since usually your JS and WASM (in the browser) are compiled into the same thing.

2. WASM is very good at bringing tools to new spaces. The biggest limitation here is in both tooling and education. It is not trivial to compile something like FFMPEG for the browser. Improvements to the WASI standard are helping here.

3. WASM is starting to see use in different spaces. For example, as a containerization format for efficient sandboxing.

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