3 ms·

Yet, almost one year after its release, nobody makes money directly or indirectly with wasm... despite the beauty of its engineering, I'm starting to worry. Who

Yet, almost one year after its release, nobody makes money directly or indirectly with wasm... despite the beauty of its engineering, I'm starting to worry. Who will continue funding it if nobody uses it?

tannhaeuser 9y ago
Exactly. WASM stories always bring up wild fantasies of platform world domination, when in reality there aren't APIs for even the most basic things, let alone practical apps. In a heretical way, I've got to ask why not just use JVM byte codes, an incomparably more established platform at this point with several mature VMs and sophisticated API ecosystem, albeit not necessarily in the graphics space? Why did we want to rid browsers of Java in the first place just to start all over with it?
- Rusky 9y ago
  Java doesn't provide a sufficient security model for running arbitrary C/C++-like code, which is the entire purpose of WebAssembly. Drop that and all the new use cases will just go back to asm.js instead.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Sure it does, https://github.com/graalvm/sulong https://github.com/graalvm/sulong http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3132204 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3132204
    - Rusky 9y ago
      That's... not Java or the JVM providing the security model. It's impressive but it's not a comparable solution to WebAssembly.
ern 9y ago
It hasn’t got a big installed base yet[1], so it’s hard to justify the investment. Also, remember that experience with Applets/Flash/Silverlight has burned developers, and probably made them fearful. I expect that once a big player makes a move, momentum will build. [1]https://caniuse.com/#search=Wasm https://caniuse.com/#search=Wasm
panic 9y ago
Figma is using it (though I'm not sure how much money they're making at this point): https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x-76f3f2395164 https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3...

tannhaeuser 9y ago

Exactly. WASM stories always bring up wild fantasies of platform world domination, when in reality there aren't APIs for even the most basic things, let alone practical apps. In a heretical way, I've got to ask why not just use JVM byte codes, an incomparably more established platform at this point with several mature VMs and sophisticated API ecosystem, albeit not necessarily in the graphics space? Why did we want to rid browsers of Java in the first place just to start all over with it?

Rusky 9y ago
Java doesn't provide a sufficient security model for running arbitrary C/C++-like code, which is the entire purpose of WebAssembly. Drop that and all the new use cases will just go back to asm.js instead.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Sure it does, https://github.com/graalvm/sulong https://github.com/graalvm/sulong http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3132204 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3132204
  - Rusky 9y ago
    That's... not Java or the JVM providing the security model. It's impressive but it's not a comparable solution to WebAssembly.

ern 9y ago

It hasn’t got a big installed base yet[1], so it’s hard to justify the investment. Also, remember that experience with Applets/Flash/Silverlight has burned developers, and probably made them fearful. I expect that once a big player makes a move, momentum will build. [1]https://caniuse.com/#search=Wasm https://caniuse.com/#search=Wasm

panic 9y ago

Figma is using it (though I'm not sure how much money they're making at this point): https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x-76f3f2395164 https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3...