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WASM 3.0 Completed

webassembly.org

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Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#451

Post by meindnoch »

syndeo wrote: post #294
imoverclocked wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are projects to run WASM on bare metal. I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience. It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-l…

> run WASM on bare metal Heh, reminds me of those boxes Sun used to make that only ran Java. (I don’t know how far down Java actually went; perhaps it was Solaris for the lower layers now that I think about it…)

SIM cards and credit cards also run Java bytecode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#452

Post by Taikonerd »

imoverclocked wrote: post #269
prewett wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I’m just a crusty ol’ greybeard C++ developer, but it seems like a video editor is out of place in a document browser. There’s a perfectly good native operating system that nobody uses any more. If we think we need a more thoroughly virtualized machine than traditional operating system processes give us (which I think is obvious), then we should be honest and build a virtualization abstraction that is actuall…

There are projects to run WASM on bare metal. I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience. It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-l…

That's the idea of the Orca app/standard: https://orca-app.dev/

"What if we made a new WASM-based platform for apps, separate from the browser?"

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#453

Post by notnullorvoid »

tormeh wrote: post #260
jesse__ wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take alert > When is WASM finally going to be able to touch the DOM? Coming from a web background, and having transitioned to games / realtime 3D applications... Fuck the DOM dude. The idea that programming your UI via not one but TWO DSLs, and a scripting language, is utter madness. In principal, it might sound good (something something separation of concerns, or whatever-the-fuck), but in reality you always end…

Preach. HTML and CSS are markup languages for creating documents. Using them for GUI applications is wild and obviously a bad idea.

HTML isn't even a particularly good markup language for documents, web or otherwise.

> Using them for GUI applications is wild and obviously a bad idea.

I agree it's wild, but bad idea implies there are better options for cross platform applications with the same ease of distribution, and accessibility as the web.

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#454

Post by marcelr »

cedws wrote: post #180

When is WASM finally going to be able to touch the DOM? It feels like that was the whole point of WASM and instead its become a monster of its own that barely has anything to do with web anymore. When can we finally kill JavaScript?

this is a really bad and out of touch take

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#455

Post by g-mork »

flykespice wrote: post #439
robmccoll wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-GCed languages will continue to manage memory themselves. Previously, GCed languages that wanted to run on WASM had to have an implementation of their runtime including GC compiled to WASM. The idea or hope here is that those languages can use the built-in GC instead and slim down the amount of WASM that needs to be delivered to run the application to only include a minimal runtime. The current scenario is closer…

This will probably benefit Java applets targeting Wasm the most considering the huge size of their JVM.

Would not be surprised to see the typeinfo needing shipped taking up more space than the internal GC implementation it replaced :)

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#456

Post by circuit10 »

em-bee wrote: post #16
aag wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not including GC would have been a mistake. Having to carry a complete garbage collector with every program, especially on platforms like browsers were excellent ones already exist, would have been a waste.

how is that different from compiling against a traditional CPU which also doesn't have a built in GC? i mean those programs that need a GC already have one. so what is the benefit of including one on the "CPU"?

WebAssembly programs can't directly read their own stack because of how it's designed, meaning that scanning for live objects within WASM is inefficient as you have to keep a separate stack in software for GC

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#457

Post by notnullorvoid »

icar wrote: post #185
cedws wrote: post #180

When is WASM finally going to be able to touch the DOM? It feels like that was the whole point of WASM and instead its become a monster of its own that barely has anything to do with web anymore. When can we finally kill JavaScript?

I would bet on browsers being able to consume Typescript before WASM exposing any DOM API. That'd improve the Javascript situation a bit, at least.

Not TS, but there are plans to allow something similar with special type annotation syntax. The runtimes still won't do anything with that extra info though, it'll get stripped just like comments.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#458

Post by flykespice »

jjcm wrote: post #176
tjoff wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webapps limited by 4GiB memory? Sounds about right. Guess 512 GiB menory is the minimum to read email nowadays.

I know you're in this for the satire, but it's less about the webapps needing the memory and more about the content - that's why I mentioned video editing webapps. For video editing, 4GiB of completely uncompressed 1080p video in memory is only 86 frames, or about 3-4 seconds of video. You can certainly optimize this, and it's rare to handle fully uncompressed video, but there are situations where you do need to buff…

I'm strange to webdev, but can't you swap the remaining uncompressed frames that don't fit into memory to disk?

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#459

Post by Aransentin »

biztos wrote: post #428
apatheticonion wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This and (sane) access to multi-threading. I want to be able to write a Rust application, compile to wasm and load it with Would be great for high performance web applications and for contexts like browser extensions where the memory usage and performance drain is real when multiplied over n open tabs. I'm not sure how code splitting would work in the wasm world, however. v8 could be optimized to reduce its m…

Why not just do the whole DOM out of your WASM?

If you're at that point, the logical step would be to just support replying to the HTTP request with a "content-type: application/wasm" and skip the initial html step entirely.

Re: WASM 3.0 Completed

#460

Post by jayd16 »

bsder wrote: post #365
jayd16 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's what they're doing. The hard part isn't the VM. The hard part is the long fought functional yet secure sandbox that a browser provides.

> functional yet secure Secure? Debatable. Functional? Not really. For example, try accessing a security key and watch the fun. Sure, if you access it exactly the way Google wants you to, things kinda-sorta work, sometimes. If you don't want to obey your Google masters, good luck getting your Bluetooth or USB packet to your security key. And because you are "secure", you can't store anything on the local hard drive.…

I'm not sure what any of that means but people like wasm because the web sandbox does work for many cases.

No one is saying it solves every single use case and it doesn't need to.

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