4 ms·
And so ended the Age of Javascript. Many will say, "good riddance" but I wonder what we lose by making the Web less shareable and copyable...
by dccoolgai 10y ago
And so ended the Age of Javascript. Many will say, "good riddance" but I wonder what we lose by making the Web less shareable and copyable...
- labrador 10y agoFrom what I've read, the architects of WebAssembly are committed to still be able to show source.
- ilaksh 10y agoThere will always be the S-expression format at least.
- SquareWheel 10y agoThe S-expression syntax will be temporary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RByPdCN1RQ4&feature=youtu.be&t=1714 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RByPdCN1RQ4&feature=youtu.be...
- ilaksh 10y agoReplaced with what?
- SquareWheel 10y agoDoesn't appear to be standardized yet, but some of the goals are outlined here. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/TextFormat.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/TextFormat...
- wahern 10y agoWebAssembly doesn't permit unstructured branching. That is, the bytecode doesn't support "goto". All conditionals and loops use structured mechanisms. Reconstituting branches and loops is the hardest part of decompiling, which means WebAssembly decompilers will have the hardest part already solved for them. It doesn't matter what binary or text formats the WebAssembly team chooses, they'll all be equally easy to parse, and even generate, in this regard. The downside is that translating goto constructs in languages like C can be tricky and sometimes computationally very expensive. Even supporting multi-level "break" can be tricky. And constructs like "computed goto", which are often used in C, Fortran, etc to improve the readability (easier to read state machines) or performance (faster state machines for bytecode interpreters) cannot be supported by WebAssembly directly, which means instead of always being faster they'll always be slower. But the downside is mostly irrelevant for people concerned by decompiling WebAssembly to readable source code.
- ATsch 10y agoWell, CLR and JVM code is about as easy to decompile as minifed JS, so I'm not sure which direction this will go.
- AlphaSite 10y agoEasier, it still preserves names.
- duderific 10y agoHuh? There are many thousands of applications and millions of lines of javascript code which will not immediately be rewritten as C++ apps. Javascript is not going anywhere anytime soon.
- dccoolgai 10y agoImmediately? No. But this is the beginning of the end for JS.