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Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.
The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.
This subject is interesting because your typical college educated developer HATES the DOM with extreme passion, because it’s entirely outside their area of comfort. The typical college educated developer is typically educated to program in something like Java, C#, or C++ and is how the world is supposed to work. The DOM doesn’t work like that. It’s a graph of nodes in the form of a tree model, and many developers find that to be scary shit. That’s why we have things like jQuery, Angular, and React.
These college educated developers also hate JavaScript for the same reasons. It doesn’t behave like Java. So for many developers the only value of WASM is as JavaScript replacement. WASM was never intended or positioned to be a JavaScript replacement so it doesn’t get used very often.
Think about how bloated and slow the web could become if WASM were a JavaScript replacement. Users would have to wait on all the run time and dependencies to download into the WASM sandbox and then open like a desktop application, but then all that would get wrapped in something like Angular or React because the DOM is still scary.
The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.
I’ve personally felt like it has been progressing, but I’m hoping you can expand my understanding!
The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.
It should never have been web assembly. WASM is the fulfillment of the dream that started with Java VM in the 90’s but never got realized. A performant, truly universal virtual machine for write-once, run anywhere deployment. The web part is a distraction IMHO.
Law of question marks on headlines holds here: no / never seems to be the answer. Article l also discussed ref types, which do exist and do provide... Something. Some ability to at least refer to host objects. It's not clear what that enables or what it's limitstions are. Definitely some feeling of being rug-pulled in the shift here. It felt like there was a plan for good integration, but fast forward half a decade+…
"Definitely some feeling of being rug-pulled in the shift here." Definitely feeling rug-pulled. What I think all the people that hark on the "Don't worry, going through JS is good enough for you." are missing is the subtext of their message. They might objectively be right, but in the end what they are saying is that they are content with WASM being a second class citizen in the web world. This might be fine for ever…
I wish it was possible to disable WASM in browsers.
Maybe we should stop overdesigning things and keep it simple. WASM needs more tooling around primitive types, threading, and possibly a more flexible memory layout than what we have now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should never have been web assembly. WASM is the fulfillment of the dream that started with Java VM in the 90’s but never got realized. A performant, truly universal virtual machine for write-once, run anywhere deployment. The web part is a distraction IMHO.
Why did Java fail though, and why would wasm succeed when the underlying philosophy is the same?
Oh, and breaking changes between versions meaning you needed multiple runtimes and still got weird issues in some cases.
The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.