Uh oh, you said "Blockchain". You have now triggered the Hacker News commentariat.
Say "hashed sequence" or something instead :-).
Blockchain-Flavored WASI
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? It's got a lot of good information on how code runs on the ethereum virtual machine. And the benefits of using something like WASI. Even if you hate block chain, it's still fascinating.
Why would you use ethereum when you can use Amazon web services instead? Is it because when we use ethereum, the price of eth goes up?
"This idea doesn't seem relevant in my tiny corner of software development, therefore it is not relevant in ANY of software development" is the disease of this website.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#23Uh oh, you said "Blockchain". You have now triggered the Hacker News commentariat.
Say "hashed sequence" or something instead :-).
I hereby propose to rebrand all marginally blockchain-related products and technologies "hash tree" or "convergent replicated state machine" technologies.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#24I don't see the benefits of jamming the square peg of language builtins into such a narrow use case. > the runtime translates WASI args_get and args_sizes_get > for the zeroth arg to the blockchain address() function. There is nothing intuitive about that for me. In most languages, exposing the blockchain interface as a module feels like it would be a significantly cleaner implementation. If I want to compile against…
> > zeroth arg
> There is nothing intuitive about that for me.
It looks a lot like how a command-line program has the program name as the zeroth argument. The address just happens to be the name of the program in a blockchain context.
> exposing the blockchain interface as a module feels like it would be a significantly cleaner implementation
I'm not so sure. I think that the goal here is to allow developers to program "DApps" using their normal toolchain and abstract over the semantics of the blockchain platform. IMHO even the ideas of "block" and "chain" are implementation details in the same way as the journal of a traditional database is an implementation detail. Exposing these details as a library means that the program is tied to not only the blockchain, but a particular blockchain runtime.
> wrap that module as a library behind my own interface
That's always a good idea, but not incompatible with having a lower-level interface (in this case WASI and Rust/C++/AsmScript `std`).
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#25Putting an experimental systems interface in an immutable blockchain seems like a bad idea. Why not just use linux x86 or Emscripten asm.js or even JVM? That wouldn’t get you as many HN hype points I guess.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you use ethereum when you can use Amazon web services instead? Is it because when we use ethereum, the price of eth goes up?
The idea of smart contracts or world computer is flawed. A better term would be a scripted financial transaction. They can be done in a trusted environment, but there are a lot of benefits of having a public cryptography secured ledger. Though the article author omits it, EOS mainnet runs on LLVM and WASM contracts and executes about 1000tx/s today. A more powerful financial VM is needed e.g. for on-chain order books…
I'm reading it. It's great, thank you, a great complement to the parent article.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#27Putting an experimental systems interface in an immutable blockchain seems like a bad idea. Why not just use linux x86 or Emscripten asm.js or even JVM? That wouldn’t get you as many HN hype points I guess.
I am still failing to find the reason why they are trying to put 'blockchain' together with everything else these days.
It is exquisite for ledger/proof-of-work systems, but not much else.
Sounds like they're randomly taking guesses at what fits well with what, and the building upon.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#28"Slow Database"-Flavored WASI Any time you see the word "blockchain" replace it with "Slow Database" in your head and see if it still makes sense.
Any time you do a generalization, you are wrong.
The Blockchain is the slowest and at the same time most energy hungry Datastore mankind has ever build. And in the case of bitcoin it's not fit for the job it was developed for.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#29The level of negativity received by this article only because it’s related to blockchain is almost comical. More so for the fact that the name of the aggregator includes the name “Hacker”.
Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI
#30The level of negativity received by this article only because it’s related to blockchain is almost comical. More so for the fact that the name of the aggregator includes the name “Hacker”.
Is there something about hackers that would make you expect them to like overhyped technologies that have a very limited set of cases where they're actually a good choice in the real world?