Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

Post by slededit » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 7:52 PM UTC

jfbastien wrote: post #22

zach43 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also very interested in learning more about using WebAssembly as a primary deployment target for desktop applications. Recently when I was working on a cross-platform C++ application using Qt and boost, a major pain point was in understanding the different packaging conventions of the operating systems. If WebAssembly takes off, and is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, would it be possible for me to build…

In theory, yes, but WebAssembly current has put little effort on standardizing packaging and ABIs. That work is in progress here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions but is still very early. You'd then need each of these platform exposing a standard set of imports to WebAssembly binaries because from the compiler's perspective WebAssembly looks like an OS with a virtual ISA, so these embedder imports are…

Post by primeblue » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 7:56 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #72

ams6110 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on So Flash, again?

Someone will most certanly implement a SWF to WebAssembly converter.

Post by primeblue » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 7:57 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #50

DiThi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java only had one closed source implementation and had many security issues during its life. It wasn't designed for proper sandboxing and for having multiple implementations in the first place. And its communication with the rest of the browser was done through a slow and ugly channel (IIRC everything had to be sent around as strings).

And how much of that is true today?

Post by catdog » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #43

whoisthemachine wrote: post #8

WASM has the potential to change the world... a thought: while WASM will initially appear in compute-intense functions in web apps, it has the potential to be a true "Common Language Runtime". It may become the future platform that native, dekstop apps run on. This could be a good thing, if done correctly: 1. Desktop apps have a common, safe runtime upon which they run, and the packages can be easily distributed (and…

We had that in the 90s. We called it Java.

Post by primeblue » Fri, Sep 22, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #59

Animats wrote: post #48

I suspect that the use cases for WebAssembly will be something like this: - - 60% ad and tracking obfuscation - 20% annoying scrolling and transitions - 10% hostile code

It's frustrating to watch because it feels like we've learned nothing from the past 10+ years of web development.