Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 346 posts

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#131

Post by johnhenry »

pfalke wrote: 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.

A few years ago, we started thinking "maybe if we ignore IE long enough, it will go away?" Looks like we aren't quite there yet...

But in the mean time, it's very helpful to encourage companies to base their browsers on standards, and move away from outdated software -- at least a s security precaution.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#132

Post by artursapek »

pfalke wrote: 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.

That doesn't mean IE is a major browser, just like Windows XP is not a major OS simply because some old hospital equipment and ATMs still rely on it.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#133

Post by drchickensalad »

hannofcart wrote: post #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.

There is a massive performance difference between compiling to js and compiling to wasm.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#134

Post by isaiahg »

I'm not as excited for this as I used to be. In most user applications JavaScript is good enough or better. If it wasn't then we wouldn't be taking the browser to make desktop applications. Recently I decided to make a desktop app and asked around about the different UI libraries. The answer I keep getting is "just use electron and JavaScript". Why? Because love it or hate it the Dom is fantastic and simple for making UIs that are interactive and reliable. And you can't beat JavaScript for manipulating the Dom.

The only benefit I can think of that benefits is specialized software like games or scientific analysis/simulation. But for what most users want, JavaScript is fast enough. The example I keep hearing is "imagine gimp in the browser" but it's already possible to make a gimp like application in the browser using things like canvas and the file api.

So by the time webassembly is ready for the prime and has needed features like memory management and Dom access, will it even by worth it beyond a few specific applications?

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#135

Post by sp332 »

KeitIG wrote: post #34

A good occasion to watch Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" [0] again, where he talks about the precursor of WebAssembly: asm.js and the future implication it "could" have in the future in a really humorous way. A few years old but still relevant. You want Gimp for Windows running in Firefox for Linux running in Chrome for Mac? Yeah sure. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and…

And for a somewhat more practical but at the same time more exotic example, the Internet Archive has a ton of old minicomputers and arcade games running in MESS/MAME, each compiled to webasm. One click and you can boot anything and play it in your browser. https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary

https://archive.org/donate/

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#136

Post by tomxor »

zurn wrote: post #125
tomxor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, they share "parallelism" in the most abstract sense, but beyond that, they are completely different approaches in almost every other way.

You might try to use them to accelerate the same specific task but they have very different capabilities and performance limitations/advantages. Also one is fairly generalised and one is intended to be very domain specific, so don't share all the same types of potential application.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#137

Post by bluejekyll »

hannofcart wrote: post #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.

Rust is the big one for me, personally.

The idea of being to write in one language for embedded software, system software, cli tools, web applications, distributed applications, and now the web client?

That's a very enticing idea. It might finally be the realization of what Java failed to accomplish (technically it did, but never gained a lot of traction on the client b/c it was too slow at the time).

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#138

Post by mythmon_ »

isaiahg wrote: post #134

I'm not as excited for this as I used to be. In most user applications JavaScript is good enough or better. If it wasn't then we wouldn't be taking the browser to make desktop applications. Recently I decided to make a desktop app and asked around about the different UI libraries. The answer I keep getting is "just use electron and JavaScript". Why? Because love it or hate it the Dom is fantastic and simple for makin…

One interesting thing to me is that you don't have to write an entire app using only WebAssembly or JS. You can take the classic approach of benchmarking to find hotspots, and then optimizing those. Migrating these performance sensitive sections to more performant code can be a win.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#139

Post by steven777400 »

isaiahg wrote: post #134

I'm not as excited for this as I used to be. In most user applications JavaScript is good enough or better. If it wasn't then we wouldn't be taking the browser to make desktop applications. Recently I decided to make a desktop app and asked around about the different UI libraries. The answer I keep getting is "just use electron and JavaScript". Why? Because love it or hate it the Dom is fantastic and simple for makin…

I'll agree with you that modern HTML and CSS for presentation is best-of-breed. I'll accept that the DOM API is sufficient.

But neither of those necessitate JavaScript; JS is just a language that happens to run in the browser and has DOM API bindings (and the other browser APIs too). There's no reason those identical bindings couldn't be provided in any other language.

Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers

#140

Post by baybal2 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #116
phkahler wrote: post #18

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.

HTML, CSS, SVG and other things your browser will interpret might be more complex than JavaScript and surely their implementation contains bugs and exploits. Hell, I recently learned about CSV injection (comma separated values). You can't realistically discard JavaScript and think that you're safe. The world is full of complex data formats ready to be exploited. Proper solution is to embrace sandboxes and put many wa…

This is wrong. The focus will simply switch to sandbox escapes.

On x86, the only real "sandbox" you have is what your MMU gives you. For as long as executable has access to browser's address space, it can do anything a browser can, including reading your webcam, mic, sensors, GPS, etc

Post reply on HN