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This is the bit I'm most interested in: > WebAssembly got a new baseline compiler for much faster startup of complex websites with big WebAssembly modules (suc
by bovermyer 8y ago
This is the bit I'm most interested in:
> WebAssembly got a new baseline compiler for much faster startup of complex websites with big WebAssembly modules (such as Google Earth and AutoCAD). Depending on the hardware we are seeing speedups of more than 10×. Stay tuned for more details in a separate blog post.
- chacham15 8y agoI'll be excited about WebAssembly when it can manipulate DOM. Until then, it feels mostly like a thought experiment in that the number of people that it makes sense to use right now is miniscule.
- chinedufn 8y agoCheck out Rust’s wasm-bindgen - https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen if ya haven’t already. Right now it you call into JS to interact with the DOM but when the host bindings proposal sees fruit it’ll replace the JS shims with direct DOM manipulation!
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoIt isn’t clear how they will allow safe access to the DOM without GC. Maybe they’ll take an approach like Microsoft did with UWP and use reference counting?
- tjallingt 8y agoWould be interesting if it would be possible to take the Rust approach and guarantee at parse/compilation time that the DOM interactions are safe without runtime overhead. Probably a terrible idea for mobile devices though...
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoThat would only work if it isn’t shared with unsafe code.
- rudedogg 8y agoSame, I started looking into WASM yesterday, and was disappointed to find out you can't do DOM manipulation as that was my use case. From my brief research https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings is the repository to watch for progress.
- vardump 8y agoThe possibility of WebAssembly becoming tangled with complicated web browsers worries me. Whatever DOM manipulation there may be in the future, I hope there'll be no tight coupling with DOM, GC or anything else. If tight coupling can be avoided, WebAssembly could become lingua franca of binary formats also outside web. For things like architecture agnostic plugins, extensions and high performance light weight "scripting" support.
- DonHopkins 8y agoI think the point is to integrate WebAssembly with JavaScript objects in general, not the DOM API in particular. Nothing to do with web browsers, everything to do with JavaScript.
- steveklabnik 8y agoIt's called the "host bindings" proposal because the proposal is to create bindings to the host environemnt; for a browser that's the DOM, for for any other host, it could be other things. It's not tightly coupled to them.
- vardump 8y ago> It's not tightly coupled to them. Hopefully it'll stay that way. Dependencies on DOM or Javascript would be devastating for WebAssembly use outside web browsers.
- steveklabnik 8y agoEveryone[1] who works on wasm cares about the non-browser use-case, so I think you can sleep easy here. 1: Okay so, what I really mean is, "I spend a lot of time talking to people working on WebAssembly and they've all expressed that to me but of course I hvaen't talked to literally every single last person".
- kuwze 8y agoWhy would you want to do that? DOM manipulation is what makes JS slow, not JS itself.