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Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

amazon.science

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Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#111

Post by remus »

nofunsir wrote: post #82
mftb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all kind of undermines your original comment tho that they're trying to avoid native. It seems more likely that they're goal is to reach as many devices as they can and be able to do updates frequently. In the first paragraph of the linked article the guy says the trade-off is between "updatability and performance".

I am really sick of fast-churn and forced updates. Guys. Settle. Write a native app or three. It’ll be ok.

I think it's important not to conflate churn with fast updates. In it's essence the ability to deliver updates quickly (in this case by downloading a blob of wasm+js each time the app is started) is a great thing imo, as you eliminate a huge chunk of problems around delivering updates and clients on old versions. For 99% of users this is a huge win.

You can obviously abuse this by redesigning the UI every 6 weeks but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#112

Post by Beltalowda »

pornel wrote: post #52

The egui framework they mention is pretty neat: https://emilk.github.io/egui/ It an entirely custom toolkit, so don't expect it to have a native look and feel, but it's a GPU-first design with multiple back-ends. It can be used in native OpenGL apps too. It's an immediate-mode UI, so it's very easy to build and update even complex windows. Great choice if you want to prototype a game.

The biggest downside of this is that everything is painted as "graphics", and you can no longer use the web inspector to modify the fonts, colours, etc.

While few people (like myself) do this directly, lots of people use it indirectly through extensions like Adblock, Stylus, etc.

For example, I find the fonts hard to read due to the colour choices; then I zoom in and it's better, but now this "Widget gallery" no longer fits on my screen and there is no scrollbar.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#113

Post by IshKebab »

throw14082020 wrote: post #101
pornel wrote: post #52

The egui framework they mention is pretty neat: https://emilk.github.io/egui/ It an entirely custom toolkit, so don't expect it to have a native look and feel, but it's a GPU-first design with multiple back-ends. It can be used in native OpenGL apps too. It's an immediate-mode UI, so it's very easy to build and update even complex windows. Great choice if you want to prototype a game.

> we built an application that overlays debugger information on an application scene render using egui, a Rust GUI library This is the context. They use egui to display debugger information - performance does not matter for the debugger information.

It does if you're debugging performance issues.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#114

Post by IshKebab »

coldtea wrote: post #97
rafale wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immediate mode is such an outdated approach for a modern UI framework. It's a deal-breaker imo.

Immediate vs retained is not about "modern" vs "outdated", both are about as old as computer graphics themselves. One is better in some cases, the other in others. In any case, the fashion (for the last ~10 years) is to consider immediate mode the modern approach, and retained mode an awkward practice of the 90s. So you can call "immediate mode" a lot, but you can't call it "outdated" when most consider it the new bl…

You're thinking of React and Flutter and so on. They aren't immediate mode. They're more like retained mode with a non-traditional way of keeping the UI state up to date. Very different to egui.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#116

Post by shroompasta »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

I disagree with this perspective.

From a startup pov, going with native apps will require multiple teams (Usually just Android + iOS, but occasionally Windows as well)

React Native will only require one team, or just one engineer depending on the size of the project

Better yet, If your front end developer is fluent in React(web), then that developer is already fluent in React Native.

I completely disagree on the "awful lot of work", when you could literally get your FE developer to work on your "native" apps.

Sure, where performance must be squeezed, it's probably optimal to go native, but that bar is set a lot lower than where it actually should be.

If React Native is good enough for Discord, it's good for 3 quarters of all apps out there.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#117

Post by nofunsir »

remus wrote: post #111
nofunsir wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really sick of fast-churn and forced updates. Guys. Settle. Write a native app or three. It’ll be ok.

I think it's important not to conflate churn with fast updates. In it's essence the ability to deliver updates quickly (in this case by downloading a blob of wasm+js each time the app is started) is a great thing imo, as you eliminate a huge chunk of problems around delivering updates and clients on old versions. For 99% of users this is a huge win. You can obviously abuse this by redesigning the UI every 6 weeks but…

I'm of the strong opinion that there simply does not exist, as you say, 'a huge chunk of problems around delivering updates and clients on old versions.' It's certainly not a win for users, but for lazy developers. Good software engineers are much more than fast-churn developers. In fact, they are different people.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#118

Post by shmerl »

ksec wrote: post #105
shmerl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't everyone agree to align on AV1? So that should become a non issue as its adoption progresses.

>Didn't everyone agree to align on AV1? Not that I am aware of. I have more faith in that with AV2.

Judging by the list of backers, it looks like everyone who matters anyway.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#120

Post by coldtea »

IshKebab wrote: post #114
coldtea wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immediate vs retained is not about "modern" vs "outdated", both are about as old as computer graphics themselves. One is better in some cases, the other in others. In any case, the fashion (for the last ~10 years) is to consider immediate mode the modern approach, and retained mode an awkward practice of the 90s. So you can call "immediate mode" a lot, but you can't call it "outdated" when most consider it the new bl…

You're thinking of React and Flutter and so on. They aren't immediate mode. They're more like retained mode with a non-traditional way of keeping the UI state up to date. Very different to egui.

React and Flutter aren't immediate mode only because they're build on top of the DOM as primitive. Otherwise, conceptually they are evolutions of immediate mode.

And they inspired plenty of GUIs outside the web to go "immediate" mode themselves.

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