3 ms·

I was saying this because in many binary formats, lots of information is lost in the code to binary conversion (.c to binary, for example) ... and with current

by awqrre 10y ago

I was saying this because in many binary formats, lots of information is lost in the code to binary conversion (.c to binary, for example) ... and with current connection and processor speeds, I don't think that binary will help that much or be worth the trade-off. But I get your point and I know that html, js, etc can be highly obfuscated but I did extract some features from gmail before and it was not quite as bad as with ASM extracted from a binary...

Klathmon 10y ago
Js minification already removes all the "extra" info you would get over a binary format (like variable names, dead code removed, loops optimized, etc...) Webasm will be almost identical to minification when it comes to decompiling. And minification is already extremely common. And you can be a skeptic, but one of the biggest reasons for webasm was to reduce parsing overhead which is currently the bottleneck (in terms of startup time) to most JavaScript heavy applications. Plus needing to keep the original source around bloats memory. IIRC some of their test applications would take 30+ seconds JUST TO PARSE on mobile devices. That's a HUGE amount of overhead that this will cut out.
- awqrre 10y ago
  minification is not quite as bad as obfuscation...
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    Minification does things like rename variables to single characters, remove dead code, optimize code in a number of ways, inline constants, shorten if statements, unroll loops, hoist variables, rewrite comparisons, and more. It is compilation in just about every sense of the word (especially when combined with a compiler like babel or typescript) Yes, it's not obfuscation, but neither is webasm.
- awqrre 10y ago
  Can you please link to the test that took 30+ seconds to parse? It just seems that the way computers are evolving that we will never see that in practice even if we avoid the binary web...
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    It's in the FAQ for web assembly[0]. First section. I may have misspoken there as I don't know if they actually have real "tests" that show that, or if it's just that some know applications take that long. FWIW, the "demo" from that site takes about 40 seconds to load on my mobile device when using the asm.js version. [0] http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/ http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/

by awqrre 10y ago

Klathmon 10y ago

Js minification already removes all the "extra" info you would get over a binary format (like variable names, dead code removed, loops optimized, etc...) Webasm will be almost identical to minification when it comes to decompiling. And minification is already extremely common. And you can be a skeptic, but one of the biggest reasons for webasm was to reduce parsing overhead which is currently the bottleneck (in terms of startup time) to most JavaScript heavy applications. Plus needing to keep the original source around bloats memory. IIRC some of their test applications would take 30+ seconds JUST TO PARSE on mobile devices. That's a HUGE amount of overhead that this will cut out.

awqrre 10y ago
minification is not quite as bad as obfuscation...
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Minification does things like rename variables to single characters, remove dead code, optimize code in a number of ways, inline constants, shorten if statements, unroll loops, hoist variables, rewrite comparisons, and more. It is compilation in just about every sense of the word (especially when combined with a compiler like babel or typescript) Yes, it's not obfuscation, but neither is webasm.
awqrre 10y ago
Can you please link to the test that took 30+ seconds to parse? It just seems that the way computers are evolving that we will never see that in practice even if we avoid the binary web...
- Klathmon 10y ago
  It's in the FAQ for web assembly[0]. First section. I may have misspoken there as I don't know if they actually have real "tests" that show that, or if it's just that some know applications take that long. FWIW, the "demo" from that site takes about 40 seconds to load on my mobile device when using the asm.js version. [0] http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/ http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/