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I dislike webassembly, but I dislike the direction web is going in general. Everything has to be hidden away from user; you have less and less control over what

I dislike webassembly, but I dislike the direction web is going in general. Everything has to be hidden away from user; you have less and less control over what is happening unless you take active steps rein it in. OTOH, I really do not understand why such technology is needed. Mom and pop store needs smooth unreal engine to show their virtual store? Can we at least use that technology for something beneficial long term ( say distributed websites )?

Silhouette 7y ago
OTOH, I really do not understand why such technology is needed. One advantage is that it provides a standardised way to escape most of the historical baggage of JS, which in turn means we can use better programming languages for writing web applications and/or develop new ones.
IvanK_net 7y ago
All WebAssembly can do, can be done with Javascript (there are no new capabilities). But WASM can do it a bit faster. It is also easier to convert non-JS code to WASM than to JS. You can still create websites the way you created them 25 years ago. They will work in all browsers. All the web code (HTML, JS, CSS...) is always visible to the browser and the user, nothing can be hidden (otherwise, the browser would not be able to show a website). I guess you are complaining about authors putting all HTML code on a singe line, or naming JS variables with one letter. But they could do it 25 years ago, too. It does not mean you have to do it.
rvz 7y ago
> OTOH, I really do not understand why such technology is needed. Well, let's ask the majority of the W3C Members which are mostly made up of for-profit companies and most develop closed-software. I can tell you that they are going to use WebAssembly for whitebox-cryptography due to its black-box nature of binary code which also introduces it to unwanted DRM features to limit the functions of content of the end-user. So we have the hype around WASM making it possible to create binary blobs of standardised malware working on every browser rather than creating an open web. Seems like these companies were only cheering this on due to it advancing the state of DRM which we will also win free malware-enabled WASM too. Great job guys! One step closer to being worse than Flash.

Silhouette 7y ago

OTOH, I really do not understand why such technology is needed. One advantage is that it provides a standardised way to escape most of the historical baggage of JS, which in turn means we can use better programming languages for writing web applications and/or develop new ones.

IvanK_net 7y ago

All WebAssembly can do, can be done with Javascript (there are no new capabilities). But WASM can do it a bit faster. It is also easier to convert non-JS code to WASM than to JS. You can still create websites the way you created them 25 years ago. They will work in all browsers. All the web code (HTML, JS, CSS...) is always visible to the browser and the user, nothing can be hidden (otherwise, the browser would not be able to show a website). I guess you are complaining about authors putting all HTML code on a singe line, or naming JS variables with one letter. But they could do it 25 years ago, too. It does not mean you have to do it.

rvz 7y ago

> OTOH, I really do not understand why such technology is needed. Well, let's ask the majority of the W3C Members which are mostly made up of for-profit companies and most develop closed-software. I can tell you that they are going to use WebAssembly for whitebox-cryptography due to its black-box nature of binary code which also introduces it to unwanted DRM features to limit the functions of content of the end-user. So we have the hype around WASM making it possible to create binary blobs of standardised malware working on every browser rather than creating an open web. Seems like these companies were only cheering this on due to it advancing the state of DRM which we will also win free malware-enabled WASM too. Great job guys! One step closer to being worse than Flash.