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

WebAssembly Playground

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#21

Post by dist1ll »

billti wrote: post #18
anoopelias wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if WASM is there yet, but maybe the crud app can be built using a programming language that the developer prefers? Like Java, C#, Go, Rust, C++, whatever instead of JavaScript/TypeScript?

Yeah, we took a bet that writing our compiler, simulator, etc. in Rust and architecting correctly so it could compile to native and WASM would let us run native and in the browser too, and we’re pretty thrilled with how it turned out. We just shipped 1.0, but this slightly older blog post goes into the architecture a bit more: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/introducing-the-azure-...

I'm currently taking the same route with my compiler. It's written with extreme efficiency in mind, so I'm planning to expose a client-side WASM binary on the main site, that will let you interactively explore the language with low latency.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#22

Post by lenkite »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

No direct DOM access means it will continue to remain a second class citizen on the web

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#23

Post by pjmlp »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #4
csjh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass adoption in what way? What benefit does the average CRUD web app gain from using some form of WebAssembly?

To incorporate something currently is only available in "native" program form is what I am thinking; like ffmpeg example above.

Which could have been done with WebAudio and WebGL/WebGPU as well, without the pain of dealing with WebAssembly tooling.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#24

Post by lewisjoe »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

By mass adoption, do you mean why not all existing softwares are ported to webassembly so that they can be run on browsers?

Most websites are just that - "sites". Complicated softwares that _need_ to be run on the web are already leveraging WebAssembly to an extent.

1. Figma (Design tool) uses Webassembly underneath for graphics operations.

2. Zoho Writer (word processor) uses WebAssembly for leveraging ICU capabilities (grapheme splitting, sentence splitting, core algorithms, etc)

3. Google Docs (word processor) uses WASM for offline proofing

These are just examples. If you look at the pattern the transition isn't happening in a way that all softwares are entirely targetted for webassembly. It's happening in little steps leveraging webassembly to parts of the product where it makes sense. This I believe is how the transition should be as opposed to jumping all the way to webassembly just because it's shiny.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#25

Post by lioeters »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

In addition to the use cases other comments have listed, Firefox uses WASM internally as a sandbox environment.

WebAssembly and Back Again: Fine-Grained Sandboxing in Firefox - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...

Neural Machine Translation Engine for Firefox Translations - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/neural-machine-translation...

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#26

Post by anoopelias »

srvaroa wrote: post #19
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

There are usages outside of the browser too. We are using wasm as a runtime for applications and modules deployed in small IoT device. Wasm helps overcome the typical limitations of those devices giving platform independence, sandboxed environments, ability to verify and sign modules ahead of deployment, allows developers to program in dominant languages and compile to wasm, and still retain a low footprint which is…

Sometime back I did some experiments with WASM over ESP32 board[1]. It was fairly easy to get a simple WASM program to work, though there was a fair amount of (ongoing) work left to bring it into usable shape.

[1] https://anoopelias.github.io/posts/wasm-micro-runtime-with-r...

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#29

Post by vsnf »

emnudge wrote: post #20
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

I sunk a decent amount of time into WebAssembly over the past few months (I am the author of "watlings"). From my understanding, there are 3 answers here. 1. Most spaces do not need WASM. You don't necessarily see speed improvements since usually your JS and WASM (in the browser) are compiled into the same thing. 2. WASM is very good at bringing tools to new spaces. The biggest limitation here is in both tooling and…

> 2. WASM is very good at bringing tools to new spaces.

Yeah, I agree with this. I have a few ongoing fresh-start projects that are being built with WASM as the primary build target. And like you said, the tooling is definitely not great. Plus the load times for some wasm binaries are pretty slow.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#30

Post by paulgb »

pjmlp wrote: post #23
thrdbndndn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To incorporate something currently is only available in "native" program form is what I am thinking; like ffmpeg example above.

Which could have been done with WebAudio and WebGL/WebGPU as well, without the pain of dealing with WebAssembly tooling.

Surely you mean WebCodecs rather than WebGL/WebGPU? AFAIK no encoding primitives are exposed by WebGL/WebGPU.

The advantage of shipping an encoder in WebAssembly for is that you don’t have to rely on the browser supporting the specific codec you want. e.g. Safari and Firefox don’t yet support WebCodecs at all, but do support WebAssembly.

Post reply on HN