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Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

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Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#91

Post by sangnoir »

1ris wrote: post #68
kalsk wrote: post #64

This sounds like an odd question, but I honestly need somebody to explain this to me...what is the motivation behind the modern trend to put everything on the web? Is there something you get by running your program from a browser that you don't get from downloading and running an elf or a text file, or is this entire trend based around appealing to users who don't actually know how to use their computers?

It's the current fad. But nothing new. Since the beginning of computing the tides go from thin-clients and fat-clients back and forth. Currently fat-clients are en-vouge.

And here I was thinking (mobile) apps were the current fad.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#92

Post by c0nfused »

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?

Sorry, my intent was not to imply that web assembly was hateful or abusive but that the code I might write using it falls into two categories

1. Performance critical code 2. Sneaky stuff I really don't want the user to be able to read.

Category two seems like the sort of thing that I would absolutely want to be able to write binary code that executes without user interaction.

It seems like right now the focus is quite rightly on #1, but that #2 seems like it will inevitably become an issue.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#93

Post by azakai »

tevlon84 wrote: post #89

Hi Alon, thank you for sharing. I am a Computer Science Master student and i would like to contribute to the development. The git looks really full and i don`t know where to start.

Which area were you interested to contribute to?

For Binaryen specifically, this bug could be a good starting point: https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/issues/2

Other issues in the tracker there as well.

Bigger topics are to make progress on wasm2asm, and to start an implementation of the current binary format (link is in the design repo), which Binaryen needs to support.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#94

Post by bromuro »

wwweston wrote: post #54
klodolph wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. It's pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob. It's true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn't really have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it's probably a good thing that a browser can be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right…

> I'm clearly in the minority, but I had qualms about uglify and other source manglers [...]: they break the benefits of view source

Not really: we have source maps for this.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#95

Post by vardump »

cballard wrote: post #61
jondubois wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've tried JavaScript, and I decided I preferred type safety. This kind of thing: > It lets you do stuff like redefine entire objects, properties or methods at runtime Sounds horrifying to me, because, as in Ruby[1], library authors will decide that's a good idea. Typeclasses/protocols solve this problem perfectly, while maintaining type safety. [1]: for some reason, this seems to be less of an issue in Python and Ob…

If type safety is what you miss, why not to use some transpiler like TypeScript?

http://www.typescriptlang.org/Tutorial

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#96

Post by Eridrus »

discreteevent wrote: post #81
azakai wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends how you look at it.

If you're using a web page that is mostly just a CRUD app, sure, no-one will wait around for that, but if you're shipping a version of IPython that can run in the browser, I think people would be pretty happy about it as long as the blob can be cached and hopefully shared between sites since it's on a shared CDN.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#97

Post by jacobolus »

bromuro wrote: post #94
wwweston wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate. It's pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob. It's true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn't really have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it's probably a good thing that a browser can be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right…

> I'm clearly in the minority, but I had qualms about uglify and other source manglers [...]: they break the benefits of view source Not really: we have source maps for this.

“View source” is a tool for outside end-users who want to understand or reverse-engineer code on websites they don’t control. “Source maps” is a tool for inside developers trying to debug their own code. Whether or not the browser supports source maps is irrelevant if you don’t have access to the original code, but only the minified/mangled version with all single-character variable names.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#98

Post by jacobolus »

nwmcsween wrote: post #79
ezy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why wouldn't llvm be able to emit SIMD when it can vectorize? The idea the SIMD is the end all to fast computing is pretty short sighted IMO.

SIMD isn’t the “end all”, but upcoming Intel chips have instructions for handling 8 doubles or 16 floats per instruction, and if you’re trying to implement a video codec or large-scale physics simulation, an order of magnitude of speed difference can make or break your app.

To take an example where timeliness is crucial, think of the difference between, say, 10 frames per second vs. 60 frames per second in a first-person shooter game.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#99

Post by nnethercote »

kalsk wrote: post #64

This sounds like an odd question, but I honestly need somebody to explain this to me...what is the motivation behind the modern trend to put everything on the web? Is there something you get by running your program from a browser that you don't get from downloading and running an elf or a text file, or is this entire trend based around appealing to users who don't actually know how to use their computers?

One way to describe a browser: it is a VM for running untrusted code. That's one thing that truly distinguishes browsers and the web from other platforms, and is a good characteristic to keep in mind.

Re: Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

#100

Post by cballard »

vardump wrote: post #95
cballard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried JavaScript, and I decided I preferred type safety. This kind of thing: > It lets you do stuff like redefine entire objects, properties or methods at runtime Sounds horrifying to me, because, as in Ruby[1], library authors will decide that's a good idea. Typeclasses/protocols solve this problem perfectly, while maintaining type safety. [1]: for some reason, this seems to be less of an issue in Python and Ob…

If type safety is what you miss, why not to use some transpiler like TypeScript? http://www.typescriptlang.org/Tutorial

Then you're not writing JavaScript, which was OP's concern. TypeScript is fine (although Elm, Swift, and Haskell are more interesting, IMO).
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