3 ms·
WebAssembly can't close the open web anymore than it's already closed today. The vast majority of JS in the browser today is minified jibberish. WebAssembly d
by Bizarro 8y ago
WebAssembly can't close the open web anymore than it's already closed today. The vast majority of JS in the browser today is minified jibberish. WebAssembly doesn't take away HTML and CSS.
- kbenson 8y agoWebAssembly makes it much more feasible to implement your own layout and display engine on top of a canvas element.
- Bizarro 8y agoWhy more feasible?
- kbenson 8y agoBecause an application like that is both computationally expensive and expensive to ship as a runtime. WebAssembly can provide benefits in both cases (WASM binaries can be close an order of magnitude smaller than equivalent JS code, in select cases), and is quick to start. As a simple example, it's not impossible that Adobe could literally take the flash VM code, compile to WASM with emscripten, and ship it along with an SWF file and a little setup code. This completely bypasses the need for a browser plugin for flash. Now, I suspect the flash VM might be large enough to make this noticeable, but it probably wouldn't be hard for Adobe to streamline it, and then re-purpose a lot of those tools used to build flash that everyone loves to rave about... I believe there are financial incentives for this to happen, therefore I think it's only a matter of time until it does.