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WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

blog.mozilla.org

121–130 of 346 posts

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#121
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to port other languages (Haskell, Go, Python) to target WASM, we definitely need the possibility of writing a GC in WASM. But to build an efficient GC, we need multithreading and synchronization/memory barrier primitives.

You can already compile your language's runtime to wasm; this includes the GC. The downsides is that now you're adding all that to your binary size. "GC support" means being able to integrate with JS's GC, basically, so that your language's wasm runtime could use it instead of your own, saving bytes.

> The downsides is that now you're adding all that to your binary size.

The GHC runtime (that is huge) isn't much larger than a web font. It is not much out the range of the JS libraries out there.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#122
All the excitement around wasm seems quite puzzling to me. Yes, I understand that you can program in whatever language you love but what new language are you hoping would be supported? C? C++? Fortran?

As far as I am concerned, all the languages I care about already have compilers that target JS.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#123
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Seriously JS should not be the lingua franca of the web But neither should this. Really, keep your code off my computer as much as possible.

I think it's darkly humorous that I have to install browser plugins to stop sites from mining monero in my browser. It's like websites are those creepy spider things in the Matrix, except instead of sticking humans in pods to harvest their biochemical energy, they're just running up our home electricity bills by maxing our CPUs.

Yeah web designers will hate me for this but at least 15% of every site is crap that I block.

I'm on a 5Gb data plan for mobile and even on the excellent 4G networks we have here sites are still too slow and unresponsive.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#124

Can't wait for DOM interop and get away from JS on frontend. Seriously JS should not be the lingua franca of the web :)

For now, couldn't someone build a js wasm bridge so that you could have DOM access? This[1] seems to suggest it's possible [1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/126

You can, it's just very slow.

See this issue, for example: https://github.com/rust-webplatform/rust-webplatform/issues/...

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#125
post #69
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SIMD is like the kids version of GLSL, which works today :)

Not sure what you mean (maybe i'm missing your point) but those two things are not very comparable. GLSL is an uncompiled GPU language and SIMD is a class of CPU instructions that exploit parallelism opportunities at the block level (apposed to core level like a GPU).

Both can be be used to accelerate the image processing application in question. GLSL is compiled on the fly to GPU instructions that exploit parallelism opportunities, but more so than SIMD because GPUs have greater internal paralllelism.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#127
„...all major browsers“

Is Internet Explorer not a major browser anymore? I’m talking relevant as in your webpage needs to work fine in Internet Explorer.

For example, my company still has Internet Explorer configured as default browser as Edge is not compatible with some internal pages.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#128
post #127

„...all major browsers“ Is Internet Explorer not a major browser anymore? I’m talking relevant as in your webpage needs to work fine in Internet Explorer . For example, my company still has Internet Explorer configured as default browser as Edge is not compatible with some internal pages.

IE is not a major browser anymore

http://gs.statcounter.com/

Look at your Google Analytics, it's really not that important anymore.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#129
post #127

„...all major browsers“ Is Internet Explorer not a major browser anymore? I’m talking relevant as in your webpage needs to work fine in Internet Explorer . For example, my company still has Internet Explorer configured as default browser as Edge is not compatible with some internal pages.

I don't think internal corporate pages count as supporting a major browser. ;)

Most development I see nowadays supports only IE11 and is about to drop that one too in favor of Edge. IE is on its way to deprecation right now.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#130
post #127

„...all major browsers“ Is Internet Explorer not a major browser anymore? I’m talking relevant as in your webpage needs to work fine in Internet Explorer . For example, my company still has Internet Explorer configured as default browser as Edge is not compatible with some internal pages.

We had a large customer that for years wouldn't drop a requirement for IE6. It meant for horrendous backward compatibility requirements in code. Personally, I hope to never be in that situation again.

I anticipate that IE will never gain support for WebAssembly, and your company will eventually change its default.

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