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Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

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Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#121

Post by wtetzner »

Scaevolus wrote: post #55
kristopolous wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will eventually come to terms with the fact that Flash was 15 years ahead of everything else on multiple fronts and we ought to have been just chastised the terrible developers doing awful and horrendous things with pretty technically sound software.

HTML5 _still_ isn't able to deliver the quality interactive experiences (Games) without applying a lot more effort. Even "simple" things like cross-browser low-latency sound effects are still difficult. Flash presents a single platform with a single vendor that can innovate as quickly as they like. The web platform is inevitably cumbersome and slow in comparison -- over a decade later they're still playing catch-up.…

> I'm looking forward to WebGL ads that eat battery life with excessive shaders.

As opposed to flash ads that eat battery life and bring the browser to its knees?

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#122

Post by [deleted] »

masswerk wrote: post #53
nwah1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important use case is to allow people to write web applications with their language of choice, instead of horrible javascript. And get near full performance.

Sorry to say, but the web isn't about writing apps in the language of your choice. If it's beyond plain, passive HTML, it's about running applications on foreign hosts/resources without a well specified license to do so. Scripting languages provide both audible code and a small load as compared to binary object code (which is, why we had them on servers and clients in the first place). If we turn the web into an anyt…

[deleted]

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#123

Post by icebraining »

masswerk wrote: post #53
nwah1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important use case is to allow people to write web applications with their language of choice, instead of horrible javascript. And get near full performance.

Sorry to say, but the web isn't about writing apps in the language of your choice. If it's beyond plain, passive HTML, it's about running applications on foreign hosts/resources without a well specified license to do so. Scripting languages provide both audible code and a small load as compared to binary object code (which is, why we had them on servers and clients in the first place). If we turn the web into an anyt…

Try looking at the source of Google.com and saying all it's doing in under a minute.

You could look at the APIs it's using - why is it calling XMLHttpRequest or looking at the user's cookies? - but you can do the same with binaries, you just have to use a tool, e.g. 'nm -D ' shows you the external functions the program calls.

I held the same position until circa 2008 (?), when JS minifying became truly widespread; nowadays, I think that battle is already lost.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#124

Post by wtetzner »

1ris wrote: post #105
jondubois wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe people still bash JavaScript. I've used a lot of different languages including Java, C#, C++, AVR Assembly, Python and others but JavaScript is my favourite and I would not want to go back. I think its a shame that some people just didn't seriously try JavaScript. It's a very powerful, expressive language. Also, testing with JS is amazing - Especially unit testing on Node.js. It lets you do stuff like…

It's not a bad language, but it's not good either. But who is it powerfull? It's a very poor man's scheme, and scheme is not powerfull either. If javascript has anything to over it's IMO simplity and not power. But I'll never understand who thought this asynchronous API was a good idea. I just wanted to draw pictures in a canvas _in order_, because they should overlap. A common task you could mean. I ended up buildin…

> scheme is not powerfull either

In what sense is Scheme not powerful? It has TCO, syntax-rules, call/cc, etc.

Of course, all of those are things scheme has that JavaScript doesn't.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#125

Post by azakai »

Eridrus wrote: post #96
discreteevent wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its worth pointing out that it would hardly be practical to expect users to download the code for the entire Ruby VM (and libraries) when they visit your web page.

Depends how you look at it. If you're using a web page that is mostly just a CRUD app, sure, no-one will wait around for that, but if you're shipping a version of IPython that can run in the browser, I think people would be pretty happy about it as long as the blob can be cached and hopefully shared between sites since it's on a shared CDN.

I think you're right. While downloading a VM doesn't make sense for a small site, for many cases it could. There are also fairly compact VMs for some languages. And WebAssembly will make the VM download substantially smaller.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#126

Post by EdSharkey »

klodolph wrote: post #115
wwweston wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. It's pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob. It's true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn't really have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it's probably a good thing that a browser can be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right…

I'm sorry, this is going to be a rant. Feel free to ignore if you don't care about my opinions on the subject. The open web has nothing to do with "view source". It never did. "View source" just makes debugging easier, it's a technical solution to a technical problem. It's why we use JSON or XML instead of ASN.1 for our daily work. The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper. It's a web where we have mul…

Yeah ... blackbox blob binaries (BBBB's?) don't strike me as the parent commenter's problem. It's not having access to a software's _original_ sources that you can build and deploy yourself that is the problem. Ideally, there would be some nuclear-powered version of View Source that gave you nice access to the original sources for the code loaded on a page - sort of a formalized "Fork Me on GitHub".

When I am being philosophical, smoking a cigar and sipping tequila after midnight, I begin to understand that the only software I've written that has a chance of outliving me is my open source. Everything else I've done has just been to serve up fleeting amusements. There is literally nothing commercially closed that I have contributed to that shouldn't be utterly scrapped.

If I died tonight, my positive impact on this planet for its people now and in the future is probably just constrained to my kids surviving me. Not an inconsequential thing, I love my kids like crazy and they're going on to do greater things than me. I just have the sense I've got more to offer than procreation and raising good people.

In my opinion, any hairy audacious moonshot goals humanity chooses to tackle should be open sourced in every way possible - otherwise the efforts cannot be fully genuine and transparent to generations that follow. Perhaps the increased open-sourcing of code and designs we see from industry today versus 20 years ago is the best we can hope for in competitive capitalist societies; maybe what we have is good and is the most we can expect.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#127

Post by devsquid »

klodolph wrote: post #115
wwweston wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. It's pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob. It's true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn't really have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it's probably a good thing that a browser can be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right…

I'm sorry, this is going to be a rant. Feel free to ignore if you don't care about my opinions on the subject. The open web has nothing to do with "view source". It never did. "View source" just makes debugging easier, it's a technical solution to a technical problem. It's why we use JSON or XML instead of ASN.1 for our daily work. The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper. It's a web where we have mul…

Well said.

Its even built into the spec of WASM to at least try to make the bytecode convert into human readable code. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/HighLevelG...

But as you state, its not integral to a "open web". IMO WASM is a long time coming and I think it will drastically help the "open web" which is suffering from some library bloat. Next we need an open and better image format.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#128

Post by wwweston »

bromuro wrote: post #94
wwweston wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. It's pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob. It's true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn't really have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it's probably a good thing that a browser can be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right…

> I'm clearly in the minority, but I had qualms about uglify and other source manglers [...]: they break the benefits of view source Not really: we have source maps for this.

I would love to see examples of source maps working in the wild.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#130

Post by Yen »

klodolph wrote: post #115
wwweston wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. It's pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob. It's true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn't really have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it's probably a good thing that a browser can be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right…

I'm sorry, this is going to be a rant. Feel free to ignore if you don't care about my opinions on the subject. The open web has nothing to do with "view source". It never did. "View source" just makes debugging easier, it's a technical solution to a technical problem. It's why we use JSON or XML instead of ASN.1 for our daily work. The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper. It's a web where we have mul…

I agree with you on some points, and disagree with you on others.

> The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper.

Absolutely!

> The open web has nothing to do with "view source". It never did. "View source" just makes debugging easier, it's a technical solution to a technical problem.

I think "view source" was essential to the web we have today. It's not just a technical solution to a technical problem - it's an accidental UI/defaults solution to a social problem we didn't realize we had.

(note that, in general, this applies to the web of maybe 15~20 years ago. Geocities, inline styles, table-based layout, the works)

The problem, namely, is how to educate the general internet-using populace on the means of content-creation, and encourage them to actually create. If different companies can put out their web sites or their technologies with slightly reduced barriers on innovation, sure, that's kinda nice I guess. But, the web reaches it's true potential when the average nobody uses it not just to consume, but to create, produce, and publish.

There's a very small subset of the population that can just read an HTML spec (or at best, a tutorial), and actually churn out a working web page at all. Most people like to learn implicitly, by example and by imitating. With "view source" available, any web page you see is an example to learn from - or a code snippet to take, edit, and make your own.

---

now-a-days, we're up to our ears in HTML/CSS/JS classes, tutorials, etc., reasonably priced hosting, code snippets, the works. And yet, a smaller percentage of the internet population (and, I think, a smaller absolute number of people) actually create their own website.

Sure, there's more technology to grapple with, and the bar has been raised on what constitutes a "good" website the author would be satisfied with, but I think the real failure is that it's pretty much impossible to read the source of any interesting, non-trivial website.

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