51–60 of 172 posts
This is probably hand-waving but : instead of implementing threads directly into the WebAssembly language, would it make sense to compile a known micro-kernel to WebAssembly and then compile the C standard library (which, IIRC, implements threads)?
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…
> Essentially, WebAssembly is the new Flash, but it is an open standard, more secure, and language agnostic. I disagree. Flash could draw things without interacting with DOM thorough JS. Also Flash had sophisticated IDE. WebAssembly is just asm.js+ with a strong aim to compile C/C++ for the web, so you don't need to rewrite anything.
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
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…
> more secure Is it? How do we know? The attack surface in browsers is huge.
1. WebAssembly has almost no APIs to the platforms whereas Flash had a bunch (i.e. it's "as safe as JavaScript, because it can only call JavaScript"). 2. The code is all new, as opposed to what I hear is a hard-to-maintain older codebase which wasn't designed with security in mind. 3. It's very static in that memory accesses are pretty easy to bounds check for the compiler.
Implementation-wise there's plenty of interesting things that can be done to tighten security of WebAssembly.
I love Webassembly, because It will eventually remove Javascript's dominance from the web for good.
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.
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…
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…
We had that in the 90s. We called it Java.
I suspect that the use cases for WebAssembly will be something like this: - - 60% ad and tracking obfuscation - 20% annoying scrolling and transitions - 10% hostile code
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…
> I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything. Well... modern assembly is monstrously complex. Probably more so than your favorite high level programming language. Modern assembly is generally not a bare minimum, because it's designed to give compilers the interface to run code fast, not to be easy to program by people. And WebAssembly is…