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Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

cultureofdevelopment.com

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Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#51

Post by aphextron »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #36
vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

> I am curious who web assembly is for and who is really excited about it. In particular, I'm curious what web assembly is supposed to be offering that Java applets didn't.

Java applets ran through browser plugins that sidestepped the sandboxed browser environment that keeps users secure on the web. This would be an assembly level compile target for the Javascript VM instead.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#52

Post by izym »

vonklaus wrote: post #19
NickLarsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (at Stack Overflow) have a new documentation product coming down the pipe with an emphasis on examples and I thought it would be awesome if we could expand our stack snippets feature to languages beyond javascript. A reproducible example right there on the webpage. In researching existing solutions, nothing was satisfying, and then I had the idea to just use asm.js and write an MSIL interpreter. I spoke with some…

Nick, Great writeup. I am a big proponent of the idea of webassembly as I believe many are. The browser is one of the greatest apps, and it is easy to look past many of its flaws because it provides a universal environment to develop for. I have always been a harsh critic of the balkanization apps provide when they are unneccessarily trying to extend functionality already provided by the browser and live natively on…

WebAssembly will eventually have access to the same APIs as JavaScript does now. Then it's just a matter of using an ES2016->wasm compiler rather than an ES2016->ES5 compiler.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#53

Post by izym »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #36
vonklaus wrote: post #15

I suspect webassembly will fail miserably. If it succeeds anywhere it will be for gaming applications. I could be totally wrong, but most web developers who build applications and sites will not be likely to embrace this given the leverage JS provides and the simplicity of use. Again, I am not extremely against wasm, but this writeup is pretty well done and my take away was that it was non-trivial to pickup, buggy an…

> I am curious who web assembly is for and who is really excited about it. In particular, I'm curious what web assembly is supposed to be offering that Java applets didn't.

How about not requiring a plug-in?

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#54

Post by kkarakk »

vonklaus wrote: post #19
NickLarsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (at Stack Overflow) have a new documentation product coming down the pipe with an emphasis on examples and I thought it would be awesome if we could expand our stack snippets feature to languages beyond javascript. A reproducible example right there on the webpage. In researching existing solutions, nothing was satisfying, and then I had the idea to just use asm.js and write an MSIL interpreter. I spoke with some…

Nick, Great writeup. I am a big proponent of the idea of webassembly as I believe many are. The browser is one of the greatest apps, and it is easy to look past many of its flaws because it provides a universal environment to develop for. I have always been a harsh critic of the balkanization apps provide when they are unneccessarily trying to extend functionality already provided by the browser and live natively on…

Also you can't trivially copy/debug a web component built using web assembly(so far) and play with it which is kinda a death sentence for any tech on the web unless it's championed as being a killer tool for some usecases-which this doesn't seem to be so far

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#55

Post by thaumasiotes »

izym wrote: post #53
thaumasiotes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am curious who web assembly is for and who is really excited about it. In particular, I'm curious what web assembly is supposed to be offering that Java applets didn't.

How about not requiring a plug-in?

What's the difference between doing a lot of browser development work to add a web assembly VM, and doing the work to add a JVM?

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#56

Post by thomasfoster96 »

gscott wrote: post #48

I have a problem with making designing websites more complicated. This snobbery of finding a new complex way of doing something that should be made easier... not harder.

If you understand the problem - that a dynamically typed, interpreted language has performance issues that prevent it being useful in computationally intensive scenarios, but can't be replaced easily - then this solution is actually quite reasonable.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#57

Post by DelaneyM »

kahnpro wrote: post #35
Someone wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenDoc used 'part'. IIRC, all parts had a presence in the GUI, though. This, I think is just a library or archive (in the ar/ranlib sense; https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/binutils/ar.html#ar ) of code that the browser loads over the Internet. Java hit a jackpot calling such a thing a jar, a word that is both shorthand for "Java archive" and a noun describing a container. That suggests looking at words such as '…

Plus jug will give us great opportunities for immaturity, like hey Bob, can you take a look at my jugs? Are my jugs too big?

I'm not sure if that's a plus (because I think it's hilarious) or minus (as a top-heavy female developer.)

Have an upvote and a ಠ_ಠ.

Re: Build Your First Thing with WebAssembly

#58

Post by izym »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55
izym wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about not requiring a plug-in?

What's the difference between doing a lot of browser development work to add a web assembly VM, and doing the work to add a JVM?

The WebAssembly VM is already there. It's the same VM as is used for JavaScript.
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