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WASM Is the New CGI

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Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#61

Post by thot_experiment »

tsimionescu wrote: post #47
TekMol wrote: post #10

I don't see WASM as a significant step forward. In fact, I question its purpose altogether. Before WASM you could already compile code from other languages into JavaScript. And have the same benefits as you have with WASM. The only benefit WASM brings is a bit faster execution time. Like twice the speed. Which most applications don't need. And which plain JavaScript offers about two years later because computers beco…

Debugging a Rust program compiled to Javascript is MUCH harder than debugging one compiled to WASM. That is the whole point. And even making the program work when compiled to JS is iffy, as JS has a few breaking constraints, notably that it is single threaded. Sure, native JS is easier still. But there is a huge wealth of code already written in languages that are not JS. If you want a web app that needs this code, y…

ngl I've tried using Rust -> WASM and it's been an awful experience, I'm much much happier with C. Rust generates enormous blobs because you have to include stdlib, and if you don't you don't get any of the benefits of using Rust. I'm probably overrotating on binary size but it sure is nice being able to just read the WASM and make sense of it, which is generally the case for WASM made from C and is absolutely not the case if you're building from Rust.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#62

Post by torginus »

cheema33 wrote: post #6

I have a different take on this. I think local-first is the future. This is where the apps runs mostly within user's browser with little to no help from the server. Apps like Figma, Linear and Superhuman use this model very successfully. And to some degree Stackblitz does as well. If somewhat complex apps like Figma can run almost entirely within user's browser, then I think vast majority of the apps out there can. S…

Hehehe, so the future is how we used to run applications from before the era of the web.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#63

Post by OtomotO »

cheema33 wrote: post #6

I have a different take on this. I think local-first is the future. This is where the apps runs mostly within user's browser with little to no help from the server. Apps like Figma, Linear and Superhuman use this model very successfully. And to some degree Stackblitz does as well. If somewhat complex apps like Figma can run almost entirely within user's browser, then I think vast majority of the apps out there can. S…

I have a different take on this:

It depends on what you're actually building.

For the business applications I build SSR (without any JS in the stack, but just golang or Rust or Zig) is the future.

It saves resources which in turn saves money, is way more reliable (again: money) and less complex (again: money) to syncing state all the time and having frontend state diverge from the actual (backend) state.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#64

Post by OtomotO »

llm_trw wrote: post #50
curtisblaine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's intentional: they need you and your data tied to the server to make money. But there's no reason why it couldn't be local first (except the business model), since the bulk of execution is local. Incidentally, I think that's why local-first didn't take off yet: it's difficult to monetize and it's almost impossible to monetize to the extent of server-based or server-less. If your application code is completely l…

>Incidentally, I think that's why local-first didn't take off yet Local first is what we had all throughout the 80s to 10s. It's just that you can make a lot more from people who rent your software rather than buy it.

More and more reliably.

When people have an abo that cannot be quit every month it gives more financial security to the company.

Previously people would buy e.g. the creative suite from Adobe and then work with that version for many, many years to come

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#65

Post by smolder »

svieira wrote: post #56
smolder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not like CGI. Calling it "the new CGI" seems to me like a way to confuse people, since CGI was a response to individual requests and carrying state across requests was always extra work. None of this has to do with WASM in particular.

With CGI the developer of the script could pretend that the-only-thing-which-existed was this request and do all kinds of things that would bring down a persistent process (leak memory, mutate globals, etc.) The problem was that spinning up a process per-request was expensive and slow. Now, with WASM's memory model it becomes possible to have a process that both does all the slow work initialization work once and has…

Edit to say: thanks for your answer. I'll preserve the rest since I still think wheels are being reinvented here.

Bridging state across requests is not new. If "the new CGI" means more efficiently sharing state between requests, that's a really arbitrary qualifier and is not unique to WASM or serverless or anything like that. The article is myopic, it doesn't take into consideration what is established practice done over and over.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#66

Post by singularity2001 »

rpcope1 wrote: post #4

So basically we're reinventing the JVM and it's ecosystem?

except that WASM has a huge classloader / linker problem: It's still very hard to combine two wasm files into one and get the memory merger right. Maybe component model can fix it but it comes with so much bloated nonsense that an adaption in Safari might take forever.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#67

Post by moi2388 »

cheema33 wrote: post #6

I have a different take on this. I think local-first is the future. This is where the apps runs mostly within user's browser with little to no help from the server. Apps like Figma, Linear and Superhuman use this model very successfully. And to some degree Stackblitz does as well. If somewhat complex apps like Figma can run almost entirely within user's browser, then I think vast majority of the apps out there can. S…

> Microsoft uses it today for C#/Blazor. But it isn't the correct approach as dotnet in browser will likely never be as fast as Javascript in the browser.

Might be true, but both will be more than fast enough. We develop Blazer WASM. When it comes to performance, dotnet is not the issue

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#68

Post by flohofwoe »

torginus wrote: post #62
cheema33 wrote: post #6

I have a different take on this. I think local-first is the future. This is where the apps runs mostly within user's browser with little to no help from the server. Apps like Figma, Linear and Superhuman use this model very successfully. And to some degree Stackblitz does as well. If somewhat complex apps like Figma can run almost entirely within user's browser, then I think vast majority of the apps out there can. S…

Hehehe, so the future is how we used to run applications from before the era of the web.

Except with runtime safety, no installation process, no pointless scare popups when trying to run an app directly downloaded from the internet, and trivial distribution without random app store publishing rules getting in the way.

In a way - yes - it's almost like it was before the internet, but mostly because other ways to distribute and run applications have become such a hassle, partly for security reasons, but mostly for gatekeeping reasons by the "platform owners".

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#69

Post by vbezhenar »

TekMol wrote: post #10

I don't see WASM as a significant step forward. In fact, I question its purpose altogether. Before WASM you could already compile code from other languages into JavaScript. And have the same benefits as you have with WASM. The only benefit WASM brings is a bit faster execution time. Like twice the speed. Which most applications don't need. And which plain JavaScript offers about two years later because computers beco…

You can probably optimize JS to run as fast in most cases.

What actually WASM brings is predictable performance.

If you're JS wizard, you can shuffle code around, using obscure tricks to make current browser to run it really fast. The problem is: JS wizards are rare and tomorrow browser might actually run the same code much slower if some particular optimization changed.

WASM performance is pretty obvious and won't change significantly across versions. And you don't need to be wizard, you just need to know C and write good enough code, plenty of people can do that. Clang will do the rest.

I agree that using WASM instead of JS without reasons probably is not very wise. But people will abuse everything and sometimes it works out, so who knows... The whole modern web was born as abuse of simple language made to blink the text.

Re: WASM Is the New CGI

#70

Post by singularity2001 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #41
pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, by folks that most likely used to bash Application Servers from early 2000's. Not only JVM, also CLR, BEAM, P-Code, M-Code, and every other bytecode format since UNCOL came to be in 1958, but lets not forget about the coolness of selling WASM instead.

That's a bit oversimplified. I had this thought too and tried to figure out why this is different, and I think there are some major points. The biggest one is in which order they were built and designed. If we take Java and ask why applets didn't take off since they could do everything WASM offers and more, two things come to mind: it was fucking slow on contemporary machines, and the gui framework sucked. WASM is th…

Any reasonable interaction between WASM and JS/DOM gets postponed seemingly indefinitely though.
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