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Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

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Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#81

Post by discreteevent »

azakai wrote: post #29
eecks wrote: post #15

WebAssembly lets people write in C++, Ruby, Python, etc and for that code to work in the browser like Javascript does at the moment. Am I correct?

Mostly. The initial target is C++ and similar languages, and it will not have DOM access, but using suitable libraries (libc, SDL, etc., for example emscripten's) you can write a normal C++ program and have it run in the browser. You can also run Ruby and Python in the browser by just compiling their C or C++ VMs. But that won't still work "like JavaScript" - their objects won't be native VM objects in the browser, i…

Its worth pointing out that it would hardly be practical to expect users to download the code for the entire Ruby VM (and libraries) when they visit your web page.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#82

Post by kuschku »

modeless wrote: post #7
c0nfused wrote: post #3

Web assembly always makes me a little sad. It feels like we are going back to flash only it won't be bad this time, I promise, no really. I always feel like the most obvious use for it is to start writing truly hateful and abusive code. I'm sure this is because I'm getting old.

Web assembly doesn't add new APIs or capabilities to the web platform. It only makes code run faster and makes porting C++ code easier. What about that is hateful or abusive?

That now we can’t read the source of webpages at all anymore?

The whole "anyone can look at it, learn from it" part is gone?

We’re steering towards more proprietary code.

Say, for example, if I want to run Google’s "Star Wars" easter egg in Firefox. With JS, I could grep through the de-uglified and de-obfuscated code quickly, and find that its useragent detection would work if I’d just append "AppleWebKit Chrome/45.0.0.0." to the UserAgent. With WebAssembly, I’d have to spend far more work.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#83

Post by amelius »

iandanforth wrote: post #74

My experience is that the barrier to entry for JavaScript is not that it's a new language, but that you have to learn async thinking and are restricted to a single thread. Does WebAssembly address either of those points?

Regarding threads, I don't think so. And even if they would address threads, then there's still the problem of a shared address space between threads to be solved, and the implementation of mutexes, etc.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#84

Post by plaguuuuuu »

saosebastiao wrote: post #5

Does anybody know if there are plans for an API for garbage collection? The WASM spec as it currently exists seems to be only useful for non-GC languages, and it would be a shame if we ended up shipping a new GC implementation for every page that we load. Perhaps something that would allow compilers to tap into the native JS GC?

Could see languages/libraries with auto pointers and stuff getting more popular.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#85

Post by yoavm »

shurcooL wrote: post #42
yoavm wrote: post #37

I suspect too many web applications are going use WebAssembly to obscure their code and the way they work, thus making it impossible to learn by studying their code. As someone who learned programming mostly by looking at other people's code, I'm afraid the web will change in a way that would make it a lot harder to do so.

Basically, you took it for granted that web had source as the binary, unlike the rest of the world (native binaries are not the source). You'll still be able to find and read source of open source web projects, like like you can for open source non-web projects. > 'Open source by default' is a problem to be solved at a cultural level, not a technical one. Highly agree.

I'm not taking it for granted, I think it makes a better world. I'd rather my oven to come with a book saying how it was assembled and how should I fix common failures it might have, and I rather a chair to come will a little paper saying what kind of colors were used on it so I can repaint it when it gets old. I feel one of the things that made the web great is "View Source".

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#86

Post by KirinDave »

klodolph wrote: post #17
c0nfused wrote: post #3

Web assembly always makes me a little sad. It feels like we are going back to flash only it won't be bad this time, I promise, no really. I always feel like the most obvious use for it is to start writing truly hateful and abusive code. I'm sure this is because I'm getting old.

What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. You already can't just read someone's JavaScript code if they're using a transpiler or uglify or something like that, it looks like line noise and you basically have to go through a lot of work to reverse engineer it. WebAssembly is no worse. The JavaScript environment on the web reminds me of the "walled gardens" that were Lisp machines back in the day, that force…

> WebAssembly is Unix

The irony of this is that almost no UNIX offers a compelling, complete developer integration outside of things which produce slavishly detailed C-compat layers that introduce an ever growing number of undefined behaviors.

It also ignores that many lisp machines actually shipped with compilers for competitive languages. LispMs just had a lot of work (for the time done) on optimization for lisp environments. We take for granted the trivial execution overhead of interactive environments but this was no small feat back in the feat.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#87

Post by seibelj »

yoavm wrote: post #37

I suspect too many web applications are going use WebAssembly to obscure their code and the way they work, thus making it impossible to learn by studying their code. As someone who learned programming mostly by looking at other people's code, I'm afraid the web will change in a way that would make it a lot harder to do so.

There are plenty of open source projects to help you do that (re: github). Proprietary software's source code is not meant to be read unless the developers specifically want it to be. The web allowing it for JavaScript was a happy accident, that is basically gone now with the uglifiers.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#88

Post by zeveb »

jondubois wrote: post #51
nwah1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important use case is to allow people to write web applications with their language of choice, instead of horrible javascript. And get near full performance.

I can't believe people still bash JavaScript. I've used a lot of different languages including Java, C#, C++, AVR Assembly, Python and others but JavaScript is my favourite and I would not want to go back. I think its a shame that some people just didn't seriously try JavaScript. It's a very powerful, expressive language. Also, testing with JS is amazing - Especially unit testing on Node.js. It lets you do stuff like…

> I can't believe people still bash JavaScript.

== vs ===

!==

hasOwnProperty

> Also, testing with JS is amazing - Especially unit testing on Node.js. It lets you do stuff like redefine entire objects, properties or methods at runtime (for stubbing).

Doable in Common Lisp for 21 years…

> Also, JS is great for writing asynchronous logic.

ITYM JavaScript has first-class functions. So does Lisp, so does Python, so does Go…

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#90

Post by azakai »

ezy wrote: post #62
jacobolus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main use for it (for me at least) is to write fast numerical code (physics modeling, audio processing, image processing, machine learning, 3D rendering, statistical analysis, etc.) in a deterministically fast way against an easy-to-reason-about programming model with an ability to manually allocate memory and structure data, instead of hoping that every browser’s heuristic-driven JIT will be able to optimize some…

The issue with this is that if you care about speed, you need to be using SIMD -- and wasm doesn't seem to want to support it -- stating a "minimum viable" standard from the year 2000.

SIMD.js is in progress for JS, so JS VMs are already working on it. It is on the roadmap for being added to WebAssembly, likely with a similar API.
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