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Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

blog.acolyer.org

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Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#31

Post by RubenSandwich »

lmkg wrote: post #27
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.

I hope not as HTML has accessibility built in while canvas doesn’t. No need to take a step backwards on this. I’m okay with rendering to canvas but long as accessibility is taken into account. (Hint: most of the time it is not.)

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#32

Post by pjmlp »

lmkg wrote: post #27
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.

Same here.

I am beting once WebAssembly gets mature enough, we will get the revenge of plugins.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#34

Post by wlesieutre »

RubenSandwich wrote: post #31
lmkg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hope not as HTML has accessibility built in while canvas doesn’t. No need to take a step backwards on this. I’m okay with rendering to canvas but long as accessibility is taken into account. (Hint: most of the time it is not.)

I've said the same, but you just know somebody comes along and says "If we render our entire site into a it'll make ad blocking more difficult," and then poof there goes the last 20 years of work on accessibility.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#35

Post by EvanAnderson »

wlesieutre wrote: post #34
RubenSandwich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope not as HTML has accessibility built in while canvas doesn’t. No need to take a step backwards on this. I’m okay with rendering to canvas but long as accessibility is taken into account. (Hint: most of the time it is not.)

I've said the same, but you just know somebody comes along and says "If we render our entire site into a it'll make ad blocking more difficult," and then poof there goes the last 20 years of work on accessibility.

Agreed. There will also be the "This will prevent scrapers" excuse. Whatever the silly rationalization for all-Flash websites was will be invoked, as well.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#36

Post by marcosdumay »

RubenSandwich wrote: post #31
lmkg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hope not as HTML has accessibility built in while canvas doesn’t. No need to take a step backwards on this. I’m okay with rendering to canvas but long as accessibility is taken into account. (Hint: most of the time it is not.)

HTML is also much a more convenient encoding for content than writing on the canvas. It's fully declarative¹ and everything.

Yet, plenty of people already prefer to send you a black page and manually write everything on the DOM's document. I certainly do not understand them, but they are way too common.

1 - You just write your content, and it's there. There isn't more declarative than that.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#37

Post by Terr_ »

lmkg wrote: post #27
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.

Alas poor applets, they were before their time.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#38

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

99% of the time, you proceed to try to write into address (-1) and your process is killed by the supervisor. Despite what many people say, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, if you can afford to have your process killed.

The rest of the time, you'll do something very application dependent, like cleaning caches, optimizing for space instead of time, postponing some task, etc.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#39

Post by vvanders »

wlesieutre wrote: post #34
RubenSandwich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope not as HTML has accessibility built in while canvas doesn’t. No need to take a step backwards on this. I’m okay with rendering to canvas but long as accessibility is taken into account. (Hint: most of the time it is not.)

I've said the same, but you just know somebody comes along and says "If we render our entire site into a it'll make ad blocking more difficult," and then poof there goes the last 20 years of work on accessibility.

Oy, that has to be the most depressing thing I've read all day.

Re: Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

#40

Post by vvanders »

austincheney wrote: post #2

WebAssembly is really going to bring some awesome fast processing for binary heavy tasks, like video and gaming, to the web. Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic. Despite this I really get the impression a lot of non-JavaScript developers are really hoping this is some holy grail to allow them to write in their favorite language for the web platform…

Well anything that lets me run Lua in the browser[1] is cool by me ;).

But yeah, interop is something that you can't just hand-wave away. It needs to be done carefully and with the right semantics and performance. That said I think we well get there and for a certain limited use cases it's already there.

[1] https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua

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