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WebAssembly is more than the web

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Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#21

Post by nayuki »

crooked-v wrote: post #6
krylon wrote: post #2

At the risk of sounding like an old grumpy guy[0], isn't this kind of what Java[0] set out to achieve some 20 years ago? I am in no position to compare the two by any metric other than age. But I am old enough to appreciate how such ideas tend return every couple of decades. Is this an IT thing, or is this phenomenon known in other areas, too? [0] I am not even that old, and I do my best to not be grumpy. [1] Yes, ye…

I would say a big difference here is that WASM is designed from the ground up for sandboxing, rather than it being added in after the fact like applets.

While Java has its failings, sandboxing was not an afterthought. Java was designed from day one to be secure-able - with pointer safety, array index safety, the SecurityManager object, classloader security rules, signed applets, etc. (Whether Java actually achieved the security it claimed is a different discussion.)

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#22

Post by shawn »

Jasper_ wrote: post #20
white-flame wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java's intent was "write Java code once, run anywhere". The JVM exposes a strict Java-centric view of what it can run, and it can be difficult to run other language environments on top of the JVM reasonably. Webasm is basically "write any code once, run anywhere". It models a very low-level CPU-like environment that the code fully controls at the byte level, so even runtime language VMs can run in such a model withou…

Unfortunately, as a side effect of it supporting only one memory model, it means that the host code only has a giant memory bag to work with, meaning it needs to reconstruct objects from a giant heap. Currently, anything involving more complex host interaction (say, handles to kernel objects like files) is punted on to either the host-bindings proposal (which has a number of issues and basically was agreed was not a…

Thanks for this comment! Very informative, and not something I would have found otherwise.

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#23

Post by w1nt3rmu4e »

WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal.

"Write-once, run everywhere without paying someone for the privilege"

I think the term's overused, but this could actually be a "game changer".

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#24

Post by rch »

bluetech wrote: post #13

I think it would be neat if WebAssembly were embedded in other languages, like it is in JavaScript now. For example, suppose Python had a WebAssembly engine. I bet that could replace a lot of C extensions, and it would be as portable/universal as pure Python code, so no need for C compilers, OS-specific binary packages, etc.

I think that will happen actually. It would open some some interesting possibilities.

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#25

Post by nostalgeek »

w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #23

WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal. "Write-once, run everywhere without paying someone for the privilege" I think the term's overused, but this could actually be a "game changer…

> WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal.

Apple still control what API you can use in their mobile browser, and it's not like they are at the forefront when it comes to implementing Web API today, especially when they also forbid any alternative browser on IOS. Ultimately WebAssembly is limited by the API it has access to in the context of the browser (and the resources that are granted by the browser). All the promises of the "web as an app platform" have not been fulfilled yet.

IMHO WebAssembly will play a bigger role on the server, with nodejs for instance as it will allow portable native code distribution.

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#26

Post by lpghatguy »

bluetech wrote: post #13

I think it would be neat if WebAssembly were embedded in other languages, like it is in JavaScript now. For example, suppose Python had a WebAssembly engine. I bet that could replace a lot of C extensions, and it would be as portable/universal as pure Python code, so no need for C compilers, OS-specific binary packages, etc.

In such a world we'd still need compilers to compile code _to_ WebAssembly -- it isn't really a great source language to work in.

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#27

Post by [deleted] »

klodolph wrote: post #17
panic wrote: post #15

I'm also excited about this aspect of WebAssembly, but interoperability will hard without a well-defined ABI. There are only four types in wasm: int32, int64, float32, and float64. Anything other than that needs to be encoded somehow, either as multiple values or in memory. For example, say you want to pass a 16-byte struct as an argument: how do you do it? Do you store the struct in memory and pass an int32 pointer…

> For example, say you want to pass a 16-byte struct as an argument: how do you do it? Do you store the struct in memory and pass an int32 pointer to its start address? Or an int64 pointer? Maybe you encode it as two int64s? Once you've made a choice, good luck calling functions generated by a compiler that made a different one! Sounds like every architecture ever? There’s an architecture specification and then there…

[deleted]

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#28

Post by w1nt3rmu4e »

nostalgeek wrote: post #25
w1nt3rmu4e wrote: post #23

WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal. "Write-once, run everywhere without paying someone for the privilege" I think the term's overused, but this could actually be a "game changer…

> WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal. Apple still control what API you can use in their mobile browser, and it's not like they are at the forefront when it comes to implementing…

Sure, that's certainly a factor. But there's a large class of applications that can get by with the API that is available.

I'm not suggesting it's a way to build mobile applications without paying Apple. I'm suggesting it will be possible to deliver a product to (nearly) all platforms using 1) a single codebase and 2) bypassing walled gardens.

Personally I won't build products for an App Store anymore. They're too restrictive, expensive and time consuming to be worth it. But being able to, say, deliver a desktop product (either via the web or packed in something like Electron) and also deliver nearly the same experience to an iPad Pro would be huge.

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#29

Post by paulhodge »

l1ambda wrote: post #10
krylon wrote: post #2

At the risk of sounding like an old grumpy guy[0], isn't this kind of what Java[0] set out to achieve some 20 years ago? I am in no position to compare the two by any metric other than age. But I am old enough to appreciate how such ideas tend return every couple of decades. Is this an IT thing, or is this phenomenon known in other areas, too? [0] I am not even that old, and I do my best to not be grumpy. [1] Yes, ye…

That's a completely fair question. I believe it's mainly just that Java bytecode is optimized to run on the JVM whereas WASM is optimized to run on CPUs. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/960

Java bytecode is tightly coupled with the JVM.. it doesn't make sense to consider one without the other. There's bytecodes such as invokevirtual or invokeinterface which don't make sense unless you have Java objects and classes.

The benefit of WASM is that it's more general purpose because it's lower level. It's agnostic to your memory model, so you can have a not-Java object model if you want.

Re: WebAssembly is more than the web

#30

Post by elcritch »

zackbloom wrote: post #11

This is technically web, but not in the way you might think. We (Cloudflare) are working on providing WASM support in our Workers [1] product that lets you run code in our 155 data centers around the world. WASM is great because we can run it in V8 isolates which are much lighter weight than containers or full VMs. [1] https://cloudflareworkers.com

That’s awesome! Much closer to what I think of as "serverless".
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