Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio • Hacker News Board

Re: Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio

#101

Post by geokon » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:54 AM UTC

tom_mellior wrote: post #99

geokon wrote: post #83

The tools for working with WASM are here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt The compiler/converters are here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen Maybe someone who knows more could help me understand better. It looks the toolchain "stack" is some-lang through LLVM to a special WASM LLVM backend which then is converted to WASM - which is similar to the LLVM-IR.. but more crossplatform-y.. I think? (can someone c…

> WASM - which is similar to the LLVM-IR.. but more crossplatform-y.. I think? (can someone confirm?) Yes. > So I guess going forwards WASM is the new crossplatform bytecode and not necessarily tied to the web - right? Yes. Andreas Rossberg and other chief WASM people are touring conferences with talks called more or less "WebAssembly: Neither Web nor Assembly". It's a misnomer. > I don't really get if WASM has memor…

Gotcha. After reading a bit more it sounds like WASM isn't supposed to really be the common target for all "web-languages". ie. Javascript won't be compiling to WASM any time soon. It's just a parallel mechanism to run code in the browser that's more extendable/flexible (b/c people where writing monsters to have their language compile to Javascript/asm.js)

Re: Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio

#102

Post by tom_mellior » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 8:44 AM UTC

geokon wrote: post #101

tom_mellior wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WASM - which is similar to the LLVM-IR.. but more crossplatform-y.. I think? (can someone confirm?) Yes. > So I guess going forwards WASM is the new crossplatform bytecode and not necessarily tied to the web - right? Yes. Andreas Rossberg and other chief WASM people are touring conferences with talks called more or less "WebAssembly: Neither Web nor Assembly". It's a misnomer. > I don't really get if WASM has memor…

Gotcha. After reading a bit more it sounds like WASM isn't supposed to really be the common target for all "web-languages". ie. Javascript won't be compiling to WASM any time soon. It's just a parallel mechanism to run code in the browser that's more extendable/flexible (b/c people where writing monsters to have their language compile to Javascript/asm.js)

I think it's a bit of both, and maybe more. For one thing, I think there are historical ties to asm.js (i.e., some of the same people went on to develop WASM), and asm.js should compile nicely to WASM. Once they have GC figured out.

For another thing, I think there is the long-term goal of using WASM as a way to migrate away from JavaScript, if desired. Once you can compile all (or most) of your JavaScript logic to WASM, you can start transparently replacing parts of that code with code written in other languages that compile to WASM. If the interfaces remain unchanged, the remaining JavaScript won't notice.

Re: Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio

#103

Post by erikpukinskis » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

bm1362 wrote: post #96

erikpukinskis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've clearly never tried to support more than one browser. Why do I keep seeing this style of comment on HN lately? Someone expresses an opinion about software architecture and someone begins their response “obviously you have zero experience working in this domain...” It’s such an insulting way to start a conversation. And quite often a false assertion.

It seems like it’s becoming more and more toxic. It’s a place to get your product or project criticized and reduced to the sum of its parts, rather than support.

Well, criticism and reduction are both constructive though.

Baseless assertions about someone’s experience are just bullying rhetorical flourishes.