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Thanks for putting the discussion back into the realm of reality. For as long as I'm in IT, there has always been the story of an upcoming holy grail of techno
by tannhaeuser 9y ago
Thanks for putting the discussion back into the realm of reality.
For as long as I'm in IT, there has always been the story of an upcoming holy grail of technology that'll change everything aka the silver bullet. Reading through this thread, that role seems currently occupied by WASM, with wild projections of all kind of perceived problems of frontend development and beyond onto WASM.
The reality is I have yet to see a single app making use of WASM on the web. And even when, if, there eventually is a WASM app, it won't be able to do anything that other (native) development environments haven't been able to do for ages. I'm not sure the world needs a new bytecode format, when only the ARM and x86_64 ISAs are still around. OTOH, what's new with WASM is that the browser and the internet acts as a gatekeeper for starting apps on your device, which I'm not sure will be met with enthusiasm by users. Furthermore, since WASM lacks APIs for even the most basic things, it would take ages to establish a platform, with all the fragmentation this entails.
- grondilu 9y ago> The reality is I have yet to see a single app making use of WASM on the web. IMHO a spectacular example is stockfish on lichess.org. On some browsers, like Chrome and Firefox IIRC, it is still slower than PNACL or asm.js, but on Microsoft Edge it is the fastest solution and it's what is currently used for this browser. It should be the fastest solution everywhere once multithreading is added. The developer of lichess stated that is was fairly trivial to port stockfish to webassembly and compile it for lichess. When I saw it running, I was impressed (and still am).