Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebAssembly Playground

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#71

Post by vouwfietsman »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

Besides the other comments here, currently its mostly:

* wasm64: allowing more than 4gb RAM usage

* wasm virtual memory: allowing real memory allocation/freeing from wasm outside of the monolithic memory model

Both of these things are necessary for many complicated applications to run inside the browser seamlessly at high performance, both of these things have been on the WASM horizon for years and have made little or no progress.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#72

Post by shzhdbi09gv8ioi »

shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote: post #65
speps wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8MB seems high for Rust. Even the project I did [1] which was using D (with GC) ended up with an 8MB WASM. Rust's WASM target is much more exercised than D's, so I think you might need to tweak some compile options. [1] https://github.com/speps/tt

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags and followed the recommendations, but there is many knobs. For what it's worth I don't think 3MB is extremely large anymore, as several popular websites already weight in 2-3 MB for a full page loads. Examples: * www.youtube.com = 3.3 MB * www.tiktok.com = 3.3 MB * www.instagram.com = 2.1 MB (according to https://www.supermonitoring.com/p/…

FWIW, this is my relevant Cargo.toml settings:

  [profile.release]
  lto = "fat"
  codegen-units = 1
  opt-level = 3
  debug = false
  panic = "abort"
  strip = "debuginfo"

  [profile.wasm-release]
  inherits = "release"
  opt-level = "z"

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#73

Post by phickey »

ledgerdev wrote: post #56
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

From my perspective It's 2 primary blockers. 1. It's too damn hard to get data into and out of wasm modules. The component model is addressing this but it's sprawled out into literally rebuilding "worlds" and turning wasm modules into sort of lightweight virtual machines. I wish there was just more of a focus on getting data into and out of modules first. 2. Lack of GC which has made languages like js/python/jvm/c# u…

> The component model is addressing this but it's sprawled out into literally rebuilding "worlds" and turning wasm modules into sort of lightweight virtual machines. I wish there was just more of a focus on getting data into and out of modules first.

As someone who works on the Component Model, this perception is interesting to me, can you explain your thinking a bit more? From my perspective, getting data in and out of modules is indeed solved. Worlds are a type signature that describe what datatypes and methods are available in a particular embedding, with standards for command line and http proxies, but easy to define whatever your situation requires.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#74

Post by digdugdirk »

phickey wrote: post #73
ledgerdev wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective It's 2 primary blockers. 1. It's too damn hard to get data into and out of wasm modules. The component model is addressing this but it's sprawled out into literally rebuilding "worlds" and turning wasm modules into sort of lightweight virtual machines. I wish there was just more of a focus on getting data into and out of modules first. 2. Lack of GC which has made languages like js/python/jvm/c# u…

> The component model is addressing this but it's sprawled out into literally rebuilding "worlds" and turning wasm modules into sort of lightweight virtual machines. I wish there was just more of a focus on getting data into and out of modules first. As someone who works on the Component Model, this perception is interesting to me, can you explain your thinking a bit more? From my perspective, getting data in and out…

As someone who wanted to try to use WASM ~1yr ago, I was unable to find any reasonable way to get data in/out of wasm from the local environment, and gave up on trying to learn it because of this.

Could you please provide links/info for how to do so? I want to be able to learn how to use it, but without this ability it seems entirely useless for me.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#75

Post by davidmurdoch »

jsheard wrote: post #70
davidmurdoch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder how much faster JS could be if the effort that went into WASM went into JS. ASM.js, SIMD, snapshots, etc directly in JS could have really made it a serious contender for high-performance software. Of course, without WASM, we'd be missing out on lots of cool software that was previously stuck on desktop/native. But I'm not entirely convinced it was the right path.

They did try to do SIMD in JS, and the proposal made it as far as being implemented in browsers, but it ended up being hideously convoluted in practice so it was killed in favor of WASM SIMD. The MVP implementation of SIMD.js grew to about 10% of V8s entire codebase, just for the bare minimum "it runs" support without optimisations.

How large is WASM? and how convoluted are the implementations and the integrations now?

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#76

Post by phickey »

digdugdirk wrote: post #74
phickey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The component model is addressing this but it's sprawled out into literally rebuilding "worlds" and turning wasm modules into sort of lightweight virtual machines. I wish there was just more of a focus on getting data into and out of modules first. As someone who works on the Component Model, this perception is interesting to me, can you explain your thinking a bit more? From my perspective, getting data in and out…

As someone who wanted to try to use WASM ~1yr ago, I was unable to find any reasonable way to get data in/out of wasm from the local environment, and gave up on trying to learn it because of this. Could you please provide links/info for how to do so? I want to be able to learn how to use it, but without this ability it seems entirely useless for me.

Some of my colleagues have built https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/ to help get folks up to speed. The best place to ask questions is in the bytecode alliance zulip: https://bytecodealliance.zulipchat.com/

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#77

Post by [deleted] »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #75
jsheard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did try to do SIMD in JS, and the proposal made it as far as being implemented in browsers, but it ended up being hideously convoluted in practice so it was killed in favor of WASM SIMD. The MVP implementation of SIMD.js grew to about 10% of V8s entire codebase, just for the bare minimum "it runs" support without optimisations.

How large is WASM? and how convoluted are the implementations and the integrations now?

[deleted]

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#78

Post by jsheard »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #75
jsheard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did try to do SIMD in JS, and the proposal made it as far as being implemented in browsers, but it ended up being hideously convoluted in practice so it was killed in favor of WASM SIMD. The MVP implementation of SIMD.js grew to about 10% of V8s entire codebase, just for the bare minimum "it runs" support without optimisations.

How large is WASM? and how convoluted are the implementations and the integrations now?

Ballparking it based on the relative LOC of v8/src and v8/src/wasm, about 8%. That's for everything WASM though, not just the SIMD support, and it's a fully optimized and production-ready implementation.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#79

Post by kevingadd »

ledgerdev wrote: post #56
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

From my perspective It's 2 primary blockers. 1. It's too damn hard to get data into and out of wasm modules. The component model is addressing this but it's sprawled out into literally rebuilding "worlds" and turning wasm modules into sort of lightweight virtual machines. I wish there was just more of a focus on getting data into and out of modules first. 2. Lack of GC which has made languages like js/python/jvm/c# u…

Sadly the current iteration of WASM GC is still too limited for stuff like JVM or C# garbage collection semantics without jumping through a lot of hoops. I'm optimistic that in a few years there will be an expanded version of it that more runtimes can adopt, though.

#1 is a pet grievance of mine though. The intentional choice not to build mmap or read-only pages into the WASM memory model is really frustrating.

Re: WebAssembly Playground

#80

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #41
thrdbndndn wrote: post #2

Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly? A few years ago, I used a WASM demo website which can use a WASM version of ffmpeg to mux audio and video into a file (transcoding obviously wasn't practical, at least not at that time), and I was very impressed. I can see lots of potential of it. But I still haven't see much usage of it even today. (To be totally honest -…

> what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly It solves a problem that most web developers don't have: running performant code in the browser. It cant manipulate the DOM natively and so most developers have no use for it. Additionally, the kind of developers who would like to be able to write C/C++ or other compiled languages in the browser are not usually web developers; most of the frontend developers I know are highly…

> WASM is a technology for software engineers to be able to target their programs for running in the browser, not a technology meant to make frontend developer lives easier

Writing as one of those people trying to make my programs run in the browser, the most painless way still seems to be "write it in js/ts." Which sucks. Doubly so if it's something I have already written in my language of choice, and triply so if it contains dependencies I didn't write. And that's practically every project I've wanted to run in the browser.

Post reply on HN