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Two of the most exciting applications I've come across so far are allowing for in-browser audio encoding with a provided encoder and distributing WASM binaries
by skunkworker 7y ago
Two of the most exciting applications I've come across so far are allowing for in-browser audio encoding with a provided encoder and distributing WASM binaries to run on edge servers.
About 5 years ago I tried to use an optimized javascript file to encode some audio in browser before uploading, it was painfully slow and very hardware intensive. But using wasm in the vmsg [1], it distributes the LAME encoder allowing for in-browser MP3 encoding.
And secondly cloudflare allows for their workers to be written in WASM, allowing for more processor intensive apps (like resizing an image) to be completely on the edge.
I see it as eventually fulfilling the portability goals that java applets in the browsers use to have, but instead of one you have many companies agreeing on the implementation.
[1] https://github.com/Kagami/vmsg https://github.com/Kagami/vmsg
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/webassembly-on-cloudflare-workers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/webassembly-on-cloudflare-worker...
- robocat 7y ago> like resizing an image For image uploading, resizing is best done in the browser, so you are not sending large files over a limited mobile connection. The code is ugly (it also needs to fix image rotation by reading EXIF information because browsers are broken, and if supporting IE11 then there is some other voodoo).
- zzo38computer 7y agoThe problem is that the browser does not let me enter a shell command where a filename is expected (Heirloom-mailx does allow it, and is something I often use when dealing with attachments).
- skunkworker 7y agoThe Cloudflare workers using WASM allow an image from a server to be resized on the edge before being delivered to the end user, not the other way around.