81–90 of 346 posts
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Expect every language out there to have a WebAssembly implementation, including Flash.
Until wasm supports proper tail calls, only the ones with uninteresting control structures.
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In order to port other languages (Haskell, Go, Python) to target WASM, we definitely need the possibility of writing a GC in WASM. But to build an efficient GC, we need multithreading and synchronization/memory barrier primitives.
Multi threading brings in all kinds of security issues
What kind of issues are you thinking about? Multithreading is not easy but your typical race conditions and multi threaded problems aren't really opening doors to any new security exploits.
Browsers and WASM have quite decent sandboxing to mitigate security issues. There's WebWorkers already which brings a limited form of threads to the browser.
I'm not seeing a problem with multiple threads in a browser.
did they improve external stacktrace support? the last time I checked debugging was imposible due to bad stacktraces.
How do I compile/target stuff for WebAssembly and integrate it with "usual web" (I need to use some advanced math & WebGL real-time that is too slow in JS)? Is there any good tutorial? Thanks!
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But what is a computer for if not running other people's code? I can't imagine there are many people in this world who have a computer with more than even 1% their own code running on it.
Red herring. People install or explicitly download code they want to run. The general public doesn't even realize that most web pages are full of code (js not html) and most developers have gotten so used to it they feel entitled. The goal should be to try harder to use less code, not enable native execution. I understand, engineers like to think about what is possible (wouldn't it be cool if..!) but sometime they ne…
The goal is to deliver content and experiences that people actually want, it has nothing to do with the amount of code at all.
At best, using less code might be a performance optimisation (though not always).
Unfortunately SIMD is still not supported on any browsers and with the move away from SIMD.js it looks like this might take a while. We've been working on porting over our fairly large barcode scanner library to WebAssembly. While the performance is close to what we have on other platforms ( http://websdk.scandit.com ), the major bottleneck for now is not being able to use optimized code relying on SIMD (and not havi…
SIMD is like the kids version of GLSL, which works today :)
And then there's the fact that WebGL is so much behind the state of the art that it's not even funny. Sticking to an old version of GL/GLSL severely limits what you can do with it.
Can anybody ELI5? The documentation is pretty fluffy. Does WebAssembly actually open up any new API hooks? I get that its a clever way of transpiling existing programs to JavasScript, but surely we could do that already? Whats new avenues of development is WebAssembly expected to open up? Is the whole point just to enable an easy way to compile games made on other platforms (Unity) to the web?
Can anybody ELI5? The documentation is pretty fluffy. Does WebAssembly actually open up any new API hooks? I get that its a clever way of transpiling existing programs to JavasScript, but surely we could do that already? Whats new avenues of development is WebAssembly expected to open up? Is the whole point just to enable an easy way to compile games made on other platforms (Unity) to the web?
WASM is used to run native code in the Web browser without going through JavaScript. With it, it should be possible to run code at near-native performance in the browser. WASM is an intermediate representation which is output by your compiler (of your favorite language) and consumed by the browser's compiler to emit native code. WASM is a bit similar to LLVM IR, but it's architecture independent. Compare this to, say…
Can anybody ELI5? The documentation is pretty fluffy. Does WebAssembly actually open up any new API hooks? I get that its a clever way of transpiling existing programs to JavasScript, but surely we could do that already? Whats new avenues of development is WebAssembly expected to open up? Is the whole point just to enable an easy way to compile games made on other platforms (Unity) to the web?
WebAssembly and asm.js are both intended to be compile targets - you don't write them by hand, but instead write your code in another language (c, Rust, etc.) and then complie to them.
The main benefits are 1) JavaScript is no longer the only language of the web, and 2) it's possible to get better performance than JS ever allowed for.
There is a lot of c code out there that probably isn't worth rewriting fron scratch in JS, but may well be worth recompiling to run as a web app.
Also, in the future, WebAssembly should get DOM access, optional garbage collection and other features that will allow it to be a compile targets for other languages such as Python and Ruby. So then you can use a single language for all of your development without that language being JavaScript.
Can anybody ELI5? The documentation is pretty fluffy. Does WebAssembly actually open up any new API hooks? I get that its a clever way of transpiling existing programs to JavasScript, but surely we could do that already? Whats new avenues of development is WebAssembly expected to open up? Is the whole point just to enable an easy way to compile games made on other platforms (Unity) to the web?
WASM is used to run native code in the Web browser without going through JavaScript. With it, it should be possible to run code at near-native performance in the browser. WASM is an intermediate representation which is output by your compiler (of your favorite language) and consumed by the browser's compiler to emit native code. WASM is a bit similar to LLVM IR, but it's architecture independent. Compare this to, say…