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Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

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Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#161

Post by cballard »

pcwalton wrote: post #151
cballard wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're dissatisfied with objc_msgSend performance, you can write C or C++ seamlessly - or use that other language that's partially designed to address the dynamic dispatch nightmare. If you're dissatisfied with JavaScript call performance, you have no choice.

> If you're dissatisfied with JavaScript call performance, you have no choice. Other than the topic of this article?

Right - but this subthread is saying that JavaScript is enough and everyone should write JavaScript and not complain.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#162

Post by tracker1 »

TraderDuck wrote: post #149
gnuvince wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't understand why. Take the two most popular mobile platforms, iOS and Android: people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run general-purpose software, but ra…

> people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop? Er, because that would be really silly. I like reading HN from time to time. I would never install an app, because I don't use it frequently enough. I definitely would never go through the pain of installing a H…

I'll go a step farther, I typically don't install apps on my phoens.. why, because most of them have additional spyware and ask for permissions they should never need... I uninstalled Facebook over a year ago, as it was the biggest battery user... I get annoyed at websites that don't work on my phone, and more so for sites that try to get me to install an app, where there's no advantage to the stand alone app.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#163

Post by chillingeffect »

Bjartr wrote: post #153
Scaevolus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

For all the problems Flash had, one problem it didn't have was a lack of mature tooling (compared to its alternatives at any given point in time). A lack of tooling makes making HTML 5 games very difficult, the abstraction layers that existed for Flash don't for HTML 5, at least not to the same level. Even if HTML 5 were capable of precisely the same level of performance, or better, as Flash today it would still be s…

I'm glad you pointed this out. My roommate's career was a flash developer and his primary skills were animation and graphic design. He spent hours doing that and got me to help out with the few numerical/mathematical tasks he needed to fill-in.

I was a dork and overacted to his use of 100% global variables, etc. He gracefully tried to use Flash's OO to appease me and improve himself, but really he got quite far in life doing graphics and even basic database access in Flash.

I think the tooling might be the point where HTML5/JS (h5js?) becomes divergent. Think about it: making a flash-like editor for HTML5 requires an investment in time and different groups/companies will want to do it differently... Then, they'll start to add tiny features to push their implementation over the time and poof~ towerofbabel.jpg.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#164

Post by adrusi »

frame_perfect wrote: post #136
shurcooL wrote: post #44

I'm very interested in compiling Go to WebAssembly. Based on what I read, it seems that so far you can primarily try it with C/C++ code. If one were to build a Go -> WebAssembly compiler, what are good routes to take? I can see there's going to be multiple possibilities.

Will be a huge pain in the ass. Go's compiler uses Plan 9, and WebAssembly uses LLVM.

There is llgo[1] which is an implementation of go on top of the llvm toolchain.

But if I'm not mistaken, WebAssembly won't accept just any llvm bitcode. It's similar to how emscripten will work with the bitcode that clang outputs, but not other llvm compilers like rust or ghc.

[1]: http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llgo/trunk/README.TXT

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#165

Post by aboodman »

andrewchambers wrote: post #132

Web browsers are turning into giant, poorly designed operating systems. My current operating system can already run binaries, this is reinventing the wheel in a massively over engineered way.

Your current (desktop) operating system allows these binaries to run with your full user privileges. Any software you download and run has complete access to all of the data from your user account, no matter which software created it. Software can interfere with other software (spyware), can affect anything on the account (malware), and can even harm the system itself (e.g., by consuming resources). Worst of all, because there's no isolation you can't get rid of bad software: once you run software from the internet on your PC, you are boned. There is no way you can get rid of something that doesn't want to be gotten rid of since it can literally rewrite other executables to be itself.

Current (desktop) operating systems were not designed for a world where you routinely run code from someone on the other side of the planet who you have no relationship to, and don't trust, so you can see cat pics or read a forum.

Browsers have a lot of problems, but their security model and ephemeral install model are inspired designs, which directly enable the safety of the modern internet.

Having to fall back to classic desktop apps for real speed or power is a terrible thing for end-user security. Either browsers need to get more powerful, or desktop OSes need to take on a browser-like security model.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#166

Post by devsquid »

wwweston wrote: post #143
klodolph wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The open web has nothing to do with "view source". It never did. "View source" just makes debugging easier. This is about as true as the idea that the only use of seeing source code is debugging (or building/deploying your own version of the app). Which, of course, every developer here knows is not true. Reading source code is useful for figuring out how to do something you didn't know how to do. It's useful for di…

Hey incase you aren't aware, having WASM output a human reading version is part of the spec.

"define a human-editable text format that is convertible to and from the binary format, supporting View Source functionality." https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/HighLevelG...

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#167

Post by [deleted] »

kristopolous wrote: post #48
c0nfused wrote: post #3

Web assembly always makes me a little sad. It feels like we are going back to flash only it won't be bad this time, I promise, no really. I always feel like the most obvious use for it is to start writing truly hateful and abusive code. I'm sure this is because I'm getting old.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#168

Post by [deleted] »

kristopolous wrote: post #48
c0nfused wrote: post #3

Web assembly always makes me a little sad. It feels like we are going back to flash only it won't be bad this time, I promise, no really. I always feel like the most obvious use for it is to start writing truly hateful and abusive code. I'm sure this is because I'm getting old.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#169

Post by Eric_WVGG »

guelo wrote: post #118
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that have fixed Flash’s horrible CPU cost, chronic security vulnerabilities, awful touch support, or constant prone to crashing, even in the hands of competent developers?

Performance-wise flash wasn't that bad on Windows. Probably because Adobe put in a decade's worth more engineering into Windows than Mac. And of course they were caught off guard by the iPhone, like the rest of the industry.

Better than Mac… but not good

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960741/browsers/tested-how-f...

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#170

Post by shurcooL »

yoavm wrote: post #85
shurcooL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, you took it for granted that web had source as the binary, unlike the rest of the world (native binaries are not the source). You'll still be able to find and read source of open source web projects, like like you can for open source non-web projects. > 'Open source by default' is a problem to be solved at a cultural level, not a technical one. Highly agree.

I'm not taking it for granted, I think it makes a better world. I'd rather my oven to come with a book saying how it was assembled and how should I fix common failures it might have, and I rather a chair to come will a little paper saying what kind of colors were used on it so I can repaint it when it gets old. I feel one of the things that made the web great is "View Source".

Agree. So previously "View Source" was enforced to be there due to technical limitations. In the future, it should continue to be there, but it will have to be as a result of cultural decisions.
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