3 ms·

Web Assembly will maybe change everything.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
Not trying to be rude, but there’s roughly 0% chance it changes everything. It will change some things for sure. But we’ve had compile-to-js languages for some time and they’re a pain. Compile-to-ws is better, but still has the same fundamental pain points (debugging mostly, and then browser compatibility). By changes everything, you mean no large amount of devs will keep targeting vanilla html+Js and I just can’t imagine that future.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Maybe the concept of sourcemaps could be applied to WASM to maintain the pretty awesome developer experience we've come to realize in browsers. I'm transpiling TypeScript -> JS and able to debug my code, with sourcemaps, in Chrome.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    That’s true, it’s easier if you don’t have to do any cross browser testing. But I still find the debugging very weird. The fact that the VM is stopped on a different line of code than I’m looking at seems to always introduce small little confusions. Have you never had that experience? It’s possible I’m just overdue to try the tools again. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences.
tracker1 7y ago
I think it will bring about a LOT of changes for targeted applications, and most specifically gaming. I also find Blazor and a few other technologies related to WASM interesing. I do not think it will displace much as far as web based applications. And all of that said, I happen to like JS. It's my favorite language. While I'm really green with it, I'd consider Rust my second fav. C# third. In the end, I find that I can be incredibly productive with JS + NPM and that cannot be understated. I'm able to leverage community repos that cover everything under the sun and write less than half the code and better cover my use cases for good enough performance. When I need more, I'll leverage other languages/tools, most of the time, I don't. And even when I do, I tend to lean on Node/JS for orchestration.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I agree it would be kind of a waste to throw away all of the tooling and innovations that has been made in JS ecosystem, just to start over because another language can be easily used due to WASM. The list of languages is bigger that I would've thought: https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs In terms of enterprise usage, I'm not seeing any mature polyfill implementations out there, but I did find https://github.com/lukewagner/polyfill-prototype-1 https://github.com/lukewagner/polyfill-prototype-1.

Not trying to be rude, but there’s roughly 0% chance it changes everything. It will change some things for sure. But we’ve had compile-to-js languages for some time and they’re a pain. Compile-to-ws is better, but still has the same fundamental pain points (debugging mostly, and then browser compatibility). By changes everything, you mean no large amount of devs will keep targeting vanilla html+Js and I just can’t imagine that future.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Maybe the concept of sourcemaps could be applied to WASM to maintain the pretty awesome developer experience we've come to realize in browsers. I'm transpiling TypeScript -> JS and able to debug my code, with sourcemaps, in Chrome.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  That’s true, it’s easier if you don’t have to do any cross browser testing. But I still find the debugging very weird. The fact that the VM is stopped on a different line of code than I’m looking at seems to always introduce small little confusions. Have you never had that experience? It’s possible I’m just overdue to try the tools again. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences.

tracker1 7y ago

I think it will bring about a LOT of changes for targeted applications, and most specifically gaming. I also find Blazor and a few other technologies related to WASM interesing. I do not think it will displace much as far as web based applications. And all of that said, I happen to like JS. It's my favorite language. While I'm really green with it, I'd consider Rust my second fav. C# third. In the end, I find that I can be incredibly productive with JS + NPM and that cannot be understated. I'm able to leverage community repos that cover everything under the sun and write less than half the code and better cover my use cases for good enough performance. When I need more, I'll leverage other languages/tools, most of the time, I don't. And even when I do, I tend to lean on Node/JS for orchestration.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I agree it would be kind of a waste to throw away all of the tooling and innovations that has been made in JS ecosystem, just to start over because another language can be easily used due to WASM. The list of languages is bigger that I would've thought: https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs In terms of enterprise usage, I'm not seeing any mature polyfill implementations out there, but I did find https://github.com/lukewagner/polyfill-prototype-1 https://github.com/lukewagner/polyfill-prototype-1.