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I have serious doubts that WebAssembly is really going to come to dominate the web the way many people here seem to believe it will. The idea that all of sudde

by cubano 10y ago

I have serious doubts that WebAssembly is really going to come to dominate the web the way many people here seem to believe it will. The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me. Time will tell.

azernik 10y ago
The success of the JavaScript stack was not dependent on source being shipped to the browser, and the push for WebAssembly is not motivated by keeping source away from the browser.
- toyg 10y ago
  What? It absolutely was. Whole generations of today's JS people trained themselves with View Source.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    ....decompiling minified Javascript? Sorry, this ship has sailed.
  - mathw 10y ago
    That was before minification. I think that ship already sailed.
finchisko 10y ago
I see your point. But I'm more optimistic. We devs like to jump on hype trains. We only need one good reason to do so.
jerryszczerry 10y ago
> The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me. Well, then we have minified JS that isn't exactly readable. Similarly with multiple-compiled JSX-to-ES6-to-ES5/JS code. Also, there's a number of JS obfuscators, whose main purpose is to smuggle a piece of closed code into those theoretically “free-and-open” stacks. Thus, I think, after wasm becomes generally supported, there will be more incentive to write code in your language of choice and compile it to a common platform, than to write code in JS or one of its derivatives and minify/compile it anyway.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
>"compiled/closed sites" It's worth noting WebAssembly isn't compiled into a form only computers can understand. There are plans to offer 'View Source'-style functionality for WebAssembly. WASM is a compressed AST rather than hardware-specific bytecode.

by cubano 10y ago

azernik 10y ago

The success of the JavaScript stack was not dependent on source being shipped to the browser, and the push for WebAssembly is not motivated by keeping source away from the browser.

toyg 10y ago
What? It absolutely was. Whole generations of today's JS people trained themselves with View Source.
- nine_k 10y ago
  ....decompiling minified Javascript? Sorry, this ship has sailed.
- mathw 10y ago
  That was before minification. I think that ship already sailed.

finchisko 10y ago

I see your point. But I'm more optimistic. We devs like to jump on hype trains. We only need one good reason to do so.

jerryszczerry 10y ago

> The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me. Well, then we have minified JS that isn't exactly readable. Similarly with multiple-compiled JSX-to-ES6-to-ES5/JS code. Also, there's a number of JS obfuscators, whose main purpose is to smuggle a piece of closed code into those theoretically “free-and-open” stacks. Thus, I think, after wasm becomes generally supported, there will be more incentive to write code in your language of choice and compile it to a common platform, than to write code in JS or one of its derivatives and minify/compile it anyway.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

>"compiled/closed sites" It's worth noting WebAssembly isn't compiled into a form only computers can understand. There are plans to offer 'View Source'-style functionality for WebAssembly. WASM is a compressed AST rather than hardware-specific bytecode.