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As someone with a better grasp on this, care to comment on a wasm-based future and the idea of a browser essentially turning into a network-driven hypervisor?

• c-smile 10y ago
  "network-driven hypervisor" is what we have already with modern browsers. WebSockets, WebWorkers, WebRTC ... all that. Personally I see WASM as a potential way to speed up technology evolution and acceptance. Like from CSS 1.0 era authors were struggling with flexible layouts on HTML pages. In 2008 work on flexbox module had started in CSS workgroup at W3C. And at 2015 we've finally got something. 7 years and very far from ideal at the end to be honest. If CSS would have an open architecture and with something like WASM in place + an ability to hook up that almost native code in rendering tree creation and composition process ... We would have significantly better results and significantly faster. That's just an example. May be that's too optimistic of course. In any case if web browser, that we all rely upon, would be an open platform/technology it will be better for all of us. Can WASM be the way to that? I wish to hope.
• indolering 10y ago
  The original vision of the browser was a cross-platform vehicle for delivering applications over the network. It's not just an idea, it was always the explicit goal and WASM is the last piece of the puzzle. Java was supposed to be key to that goal, but it didn't match the capabilities of the network and processing speed of the time. As painful as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are to use, they actually worked. Compile-to-JS, NaCL, and asm.js culminated in a realistic blueprint for how to build a low-level network-oriented runtime. Combined with increases to network speed (the average webpage is the size of the original DOOM) WASM is finally doable. On the plus side, holy shit we can do (almost) anything! WASM will also mean outside money pumped into improving the browser runtime, such as Ethereum's migration to WASM. Some of the parent comment is tongue-in-cheek, but you can already see one downside: fragmentation. Any good API gets screwed up in committee, so we end up with the most bare-bones and verbose implementation possible (WebComponents, IndexedDB, etc). Since they are so painful to use we end up importing 3rd party libraries which entails incompatibility. The content itself also becomes more opaque, as we can't just parse HTML to figure out the contents of the page. That being said, holy-shit we can do anything!
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "The original vision of the browser was a cross-platform vehicle for delivering applications over the network." The original vision for the browser was as a vehicle for browsing through interlinked documents. Web apps were an afterthought.