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WASM Is the New CGI

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Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#21

Post by mattdesl »

cheema33 wrote: post #6

I have a different take on this. I think local-first is the future. This is where the apps runs mostly within user's browser with little to no help from the server. Apps like Figma, Linear and Superhuman use this model very successfully. And to some degree Stackblitz does as well. If somewhat complex apps like Figma can run almost entirely within user's browser, then I think vast majority of the apps out there can. S…

I’m not sure I’d call Figma local first. If I’m offline or in a spotty wifi area, I can’t load my designs. And unless it’s recently changed, if you lose wifi and quit the browser after some edits, they won’t be saved.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#22

Post by thot_experiment »

TekMol wrote: post #10

I don't see WASM as a significant step forward. In fact, I question its purpose altogether. Before WASM you could already compile code from other languages into JavaScript. And have the same benefits as you have with WASM. The only benefit WASM brings is a bit faster execution time. Like twice the speed. Which most applications don't need. And which plain JavaScript offers about two years later because computers beco…

Bad take. Yes, you can probably optimize a lot of algos in JS such that they are pretty fast, but THAT is cumbersome. I'd much rather write the things I need to go fast in a language that's good at that (I use C for this). I'm currently working on a toolpath optimizer and I'm compiling just the optimizer function to WASM, it's a couple kilobytes and will probably be an order of magnitude faster than the JS implementation while being FAR LESS cumbersome to write. My JS doesn't change at all because i can just call the "native function" from JS, replacing my original JS impl.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#23

Post by Kwpolska »

freetonik wrote: post #11
junto wrote: post #8

Can someone explain to me what the difference really is between WASM and older tech like Java Applets, ActiveX, Silverlight and Macromedia Flash, because they don’t really sound much different to me. Maybe I’m just old, but I thought we’d learnt our lesson on running untrusted third party compiled code in a web browser. In all of these cases it’s pitched as improving the customer experience but also conveniently push…

Not an answer, but I think it’s unfair to group Flash with the others because it was both the editor/compiler and the player were proprietary. I guess same applies to Silverlight at least.

The ActiveX "player" (Internet Explorer) was also proprietary. And I'm not sure if you could get away without proprietary Microsoft tools to develop for it.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#24

Post by TekMol »

thot_experiment wrote: post #22
TekMol wrote: post #10

I don't see WASM as a significant step forward. In fact, I question its purpose altogether. Before WASM you could already compile code from other languages into JavaScript. And have the same benefits as you have with WASM. The only benefit WASM brings is a bit faster execution time. Like twice the speed. Which most applications don't need. And which plain JavaScript offers about two years later because computers beco…

Bad take. Yes, you can probably optimize a lot of algos in JS such that they are pretty fast, but THAT is cumbersome. I'd much rather write the things I need to go fast in a language that's good at that (I use C for this). I'm currently working on a toolpath optimizer and I'm compiling just the optimizer function to WASM, it's a couple kilobytes and will probably be an order of magnitude faster than the JS implementa…

    probably be an order of magnitude
    faster than the JS implementation
What makes you think so?

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#25

Post by smolder »

svieira wrote: post #13
smolder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not seem to support the title. You'll have to show me how it does. 'serverless' is a wholly different concept that doesn't have much to do with wasm. You could say it's CGI as a service, but that has nothing to do with wasm.

It's quite buried amid a lot of extra paragraphs expositing about WASM and the future of serverless functions in general, but the article does contain this quote: > One of the many effect of how [WASM] modules are isolated is that you can "pause" a module, and save its memory as a data segment. A similar concept to a Snapshot of a virtual machine. You can then start as many copies of the paused module as you like. (A…

This is not like CGI. Calling it "the new CGI" seems to me like a way to confuse people, since CGI was a response to individual requests and carrying state across requests was always extra work. None of this has to do with WASM in particular.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#26

Post by csomar »

cheema33 wrote: post #6

I have a different take on this. I think local-first is the future. This is where the apps runs mostly within user's browser with little to no help from the server. Apps like Figma, Linear and Superhuman use this model very successfully. And to some degree Stackblitz does as well. If somewhat complex apps like Figma can run almost entirely within user's browser, then I think vast majority of the apps out there can. S…

At the end of the day, all you are doing is syncing state with the server. In the future, you'll have a local state and a server state and the only server component is a sync Wasm binary hehe.

Still, you'll be coding your front-end with Wasm/Rust, so get in on the Rust train :)

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#27

Post by tsimionescu »

junto wrote: post #8

Can someone explain to me what the difference really is between WASM and older tech like Java Applets, ActiveX, Silverlight and Macromedia Flash, because they don’t really sound much different to me. Maybe I’m just old, but I thought we’d learnt our lesson on running untrusted third party compiled code in a web browser. In all of these cases it’s pitched as improving the customer experience but also conveniently push…

Pushing compute to the client is the whole point, and is often a major improvement for the end user, especially in the era in which phones are faster than the supercomputers of the 90s.

And otherwise, WASM is different in two ways.

For one, browsers have gotten pretty good at running untrusted 3rd party code safely, which Flash or the JVM or IE or.NET were never even slightly adequate for.

The other difference is that WASM is designed to allow you to take a program in any language and run it in the user's browser. The techs you mention were all available for a single language, so if you already had a program in, say, Python, you'd have to re-write it in Java or C#, or maybe Scala or F#, to run it as an applet or Silverlight program.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#28

Post by Muromec »

smolder wrote: post #2

I kind of like this variety of headline for it's ability to stimulate discussion but it's also nonsense. CGI can be any type of code responding to an individual web request, represented as a set of parameters. It has basically nothing to do with wasm which is meant to be a universal code representation for a universal virtual machine. Have I missed something?

You might have missed wasi

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#29

Post by thot_experiment »

pjmlp wrote: post #7
rpcope1 wrote: post #4

So basically we're reinventing the JVM and it's ecosystem?

Yeah, by folks that most likely used to bash Application Servers from early 2000's. Not only JVM, also CLR, BEAM, P-Code, M-Code, and every other bytecode format since UNCOL came to be in 1958, but lets not forget about the coolness of selling WASM instead.

The coolness of WASM is that I can run WASM on like 99.999% of the targets I care to run code on with zero friction. Everyone (well it's HN so someone is probably on LYNX) reading this page is doing so in a browser with a WASM runtime. That has tremendous value.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#30

Post by winternewt »

TekMol wrote: post #10

I don't see WASM as a significant step forward. In fact, I question its purpose altogether. Before WASM you could already compile code from other languages into JavaScript. And have the same benefits as you have with WASM. The only benefit WASM brings is a bit faster execution time. Like twice the speed. Which most applications don't need. And which plain JavaScript offers about two years later because computers beco…

It's difficult or impossible to compile many languages into JavaScript. WASM is more general.
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