Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly • Hacker News Board

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#21

Post by baq » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

zach43 wrote: post #18

whoisthemachine wrote: post #8

WASM has the potential to change the world... a thought: while WASM will initially appear in compute-intense functions in web apps, it has the potential to be a true "Common Language Runtime". It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on. This could be a good thing, if done correctly: 1. Desktop apps have a common, safe runtime upon which they run, and the packages can be easily distributed (and…

I am also very interested in learning more about using WebAssembly as a primary deployment target for desktop applications. Recently when I was working on a cross-platform C++ application using Qt and boost, a major pain point was in understanding the different packaging conventions of the operating systems. If WebAssembly takes off, and is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, would it be possible for me to build…

If you google around, you'll find that POCs exist - qt apps on the browser in canvas tags. Accessibility nightmare but otherwise a dream come true in the so called enterprise. Can't wait for this tech to mature a bit more.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#22

Post by jfbastien » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

zach43 wrote: post #18

whoisthemachine wrote: post #8

WASM has the potential to change the world... a thought: while WASM will initially appear in compute-intense functions in web apps, it has the potential to be a true "Common Language Runtime". It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on. This could be a good thing, if done correctly: 1. Desktop apps have a common, safe runtime upon which they run, and the packages can be easily distributed (and…

I am also very interested in learning more about using WebAssembly as a primary deployment target for desktop applications. Recently when I was working on a cross-platform C++ application using Qt and boost, a major pain point was in understanding the different packaging conventions of the operating systems. If WebAssembly takes off, and is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, would it be possible for me to build…

In theory, yes, but WebAssembly current has put little effort on standardizing packaging and ABIs. That work is in progress here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions but is still very early. You'd then need each of these platform exposing a standard set of imports to WebAssembly binaries because from the compiler's perspective WebAssembly looks like an OS with a virtual ISA, so these embedder imports are kind of like an OS' syscalls. That's a lot of work, isn't very advanced yet, but in theory is all possible and WebAssembly was explicitly designed to make it possible.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#23

Post by jfbastien » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #20

We spent a long time wishing for a VM for the web that could be targetted by any language and being told that wasn't possible. WebAssembly will finally deliver that and it seems to be done by the same people/organizations. What changed?

Same organizations, different people, and enough time to experiment with (read: suffer pains from) things like asm.js and PNaCl for those people to agree that something like WebAssembly was a good idea.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#24

Post by revmoo » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 4:50 PM UTC

I've been a programmer for at least a decade and I understood nothing in this article. Very excited about the concept of being able to write C and compile it down to WebAssembly though.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#25

Post by flohofwoe » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

zach43 wrote: post #18

whoisthemachine wrote: post #8

WASM has the potential to change the world... a thought: while WASM will initially appear in compute-intense functions in web apps, it has the potential to be a true "Common Language Runtime". It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on. This could be a good thing, if done correctly: 1. Desktop apps have a common, safe runtime upon which they run, and the packages can be easily distributed (and…

I am also very interested in learning more about using WebAssembly as a primary deployment target for desktop applications. Recently when I was working on a cross-platform C++ application using Qt and boost, a major pain point was in understanding the different packaging conventions of the operating systems. If WebAssembly takes off, and is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, would it be possible for me to build…

WebAssembly itself is just (more or less) an instruction set, not a complete runtime platform. It doesn't define APIs for rendering, audio, input, filesystem access, networking, etc...

Electron provides all that, but at the very high cost of shipping a complete browser runtime with your app.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#26

Post by revmoo » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 4:52 PM UTC

flavio81 wrote: post #9

I love Webassembly, because It will eventually remove Javascript's dominance from the web for good.

Not a chance. Also WebAssembly doesn't really replace JS. If anything it will sit alongside it.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#27

Post by lmkg » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

whoisthemachine wrote: post #8

WASM has the potential to change the world... a thought: while WASM will initially appear in compute-intense functions in web apps, it has the potential to be a true "Common Language Runtime". It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on. This could be a good thing, if done correctly: 1. Desktop apps have a common, safe runtime upon which they run, and the packages can be easily distributed (and…

I have the suspicion that one possible future of HTML is to be a legacy delivery wrapper for WASM code and a element.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#28

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

I was a bit skeptical of WebAssembly when it started popping up, but reading through this and the MDN docs has made me get a bit more excited.

In a few years WebAssembly might make for a great environment to learn about lower level programming. I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything.

What's the reasonable thing to do when a grow-memory instruction returns -1?

How are people using WebAssembly? Are there high-quality polyfills available for older browsers?

How is forward-compatibility expected to be handled? Right now there's only WebAssembly with the core feature-set. What happens as some vendors start to add support for varying features such as GC, SIMD, threads, etc.?

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#29

Post by jfbastien » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #28

I was a bit skeptical of WebAssembly when it started popping up, but reading through this and the MDN docs has made me get a bit more excited. In a few years WebAssembly might make for a great environment to learn about lower level programming. I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything. What's the reasonable thing to do when a grow-memo…

> What's the reasonable thing to do when a grow-memory instruction returns -1?

A good assumption is that your WebAssembly binary already has an implementation of malloc which calls grow_memory. It should do something sane, and you shouldn't need to worry: it's similar to having mmap fail on other platforms. What do you do when mmap fail? I usually just give up and abort, but in rare cases I'll do other fancy things.

> Are there high-quality polyfills available for older browsers?

Work had started in 2015 for a solid polyfill, but now all major browser vendors have shipped WebAssembly so that work wasn't seen as necessary anymore.

> How is forward-compatibility expected to be handled? Right now there's only WebAssembly with the core feature-set. What happens as some vendors start to add support for varying features such as GC, SIMD, threads, etc.?

Not that satisfying an answer, but https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FeatureTes...

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#30

Post by avaer » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 5:21 PM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #28

I was a bit skeptical of WebAssembly when it started popping up, but reading through this and the MDN docs has made me get a bit more excited. In a few years WebAssembly might make for a great environment to learn about lower level programming. I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything. What's the reasonable thing to do when a grow-memo…

> I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything.

Well... modern assembly is monstrously complex. Probably more so than your favorite high level programming language. Modern assembly is generally not a bare minimum, because it's designed to give compilers the interface to run code fast, not to be easy to program by people.

And WebAssembly is a bit of a misnomer since it's not quite your processor's assembly; it's designed to be assembled fast on the client side, while also being memory-safe. Ironically that makes it simpler than actual assembly.