14 ms·

Web Assembly It's interesting in a bunch of ways, and I think it might end up having a wider impact than anyone has really realized yet. It's an ISA that look

by gpm 6y ago

Web Assembly It's interesting in a bunch of ways, and I think it might end up having a wider impact than anyone has really realized yet. It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications, embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, and so on. It looks like it's going to enable a wider variety of languages on the web, many more performant than the current ones. That's interesting on it's own, but not the main reason why I think the technology is interesting. Both mobile devices, and crypto currencies, are places where hardware acceleration is a thing. If this is going to be a popular ISA in both of those, might we get chips whose native ISA is web assembly? Once we have hardware acceleration, do we see wasm chips running as CPUs someday in the not too distant future (CPU with an emphasis on Central)? A lot of people seem excited about the potential for risc-v, and arm is gaining momentum against x86 to some extent, but to me wasm actually seems best placed to takeover as the dominant ISA. Anyways, I doubt that thinking about this is going to have much direct impact on my life... this isn't something I feel any need to help along (or a change I feel the need to try and resist). It's just a technology that I think will be interesting to watch as the future unfolds.

lukevp 6y ago
I agree! WASM is very interesting. Blazor is an exciting example of an application of Web Assembly - it's starting out as .net in the browser, but you can imagine a lightweight wasm version of the .net runtime could be used in a lot of places as a sandboxed runtime. The main .net runtime is not really meant to run unprivileged. It would be more like the UWP concept that MS made to sandbox apps for the windows App Store, but applicable to all OSes. One thing I haven't heard much about is the packaging of wasm runtimes. For example, instead of including all of the .net runtime as scripts that need to be downloaded, we could have canonical releases of major libraries pre-installed in our browsers, and could even have the browser have pre-warmed runtimes ready to execute, in theory. So if we wanted to have a really fast startup time for .net, my browser could transparently cache a runtime. Basically like CDN references to JS files, but for entire language runtimes. This would obviate the need for browsers to natively support language runtimes. It's conceptually a way to get back to something like Flash or SilverLight but with a super simple fallback that doesn't require any plugin to be installed.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  I look forward to in browser DLL hell /s I'm cautiously optimistic about blazor, it definitely makes streaming data to the Dom much easier
  - k__ 6y ago
    Blazor seems like the only one application of WASM at the moment that goes in the completely wrong direction. People are already whining about JS bundle size and even the small .net runtimes are >60kb. Yew on the other hand seems to fit right into what WebAssembly was made for.
    - rogihee 6y ago
      The download size does make it hard to use for a "public" site, like a webshop. But it is a different story for an application, like an intranet solution or app like Figma. A first time download of a few MB's is not a problem, as you regularly use it. Like a desktop application. It is the first time you can develop a full stack application (client and backend) in one language in one debugging session. For C# that was possible with Silverlight. Small companies (like mine) that deliver applications and have full stack engineers can have some amazing productivity! So for my needs I'm really excited with something like Blazor, and this was only the first release.
      - k__ 6y ago
        I understand the appeal for .net devs. I just don't think it's a good idea in general.
    - blackoil 6y ago
      For every person whining about 60k JS there are 10 creating 10MB web app.
als0 6y ago
Cautionary tale: we’ve been here before with JVM CPUs like Jazelle. They didn’t take over the world.
- gpm 6y ago
  Absolutely, but there's been plenty of technologies where the time wasn't right the first time around, but it was the second, or third, or fourth.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Even closer to home. Palm, RIM, Microsoft, Apple and Google have all said at one point that web apps were the answer for mobile apps....
  - ethbro 6y ago
    I mean, modern Google was half-built on the back of the Gmail web app...
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Gmail was introduced after Google was already popular. The Google home page’s claim to fame was always its simplicity and fast load time.
      - ethbro 6y ago
        To an average user, Google in 2003 was a search page. In 2004+, it was essential internet infrastructure. That's a pretty big difference.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Gmail is popular but in the grand scheme of things it’s not that popular for email. I’m sure that most people get most of their utility from email from their corporate email. Their personal email is mostly used for distant relationship type communications. Most personal interactions these days happen via messaging and social media. AKA “Email is for old people”. Also, a lot of computer use is via mobile these days and I doubt too many people are using the web interface on mobile for gmail.
hackcasual 6y ago
I'd argue somewhat the opposite. Because WebAssembly is abstract but low level, it makes it really easy for a platform to optimize specifically for that platform, so instead of creating a need for specific platforms, it'll allow more diverse systems to run the same "native" blobs.
jariel 6y ago
That potentiality has been there for many many years, I don't see 'the thing' that provides the critical mass necessary to make it work in reality. Web Assembly is one of the more misunderstood technologies in terms of it's real, practical application. At its core, it crunches numbers, in limited memory space. So this can provide some 'performance enhancements' possibly for running some kinds of algorithms. It means you can also write those in C/C++, or port them. Autodesk does this for some online viewers. This is actually a surprisingly narrow area of application and it still comes with a lot of complexity. WA is a black box with no access to anything and how useful really is that? Most of an app is drawing 'stuff' on the screen, storage, networking, user event management, fonts, image, videos - that's literally what apps are. The notion of adding 'black box for calculating stuff more quickly' is a major afterthought. At the end of the day, JS keeps improving quite a lot and does pretty well, it might make more sense to have a variation of this that can be even more optimized than building something ground up. WASI - the standard WA interface is a neat project, but I feel it may come along with some serious security headaches. Once you 'break out of the black box' ... well ... it's no longer a 'black box'. WA will be a perennially interesting technology and maybe the best example of something that looks obviously useful but in reality isn't really. WA actually serves as a really great Product Manager's instructional example to articulate 'what things actually create value and why'. It will be interesting to see how far we get with WASI.
- cdcarter 6y ago
  I think you're underestimating WASI. Projects like cloudABI, where an existing app is compiled against a libc with strong sandboxing, really cool things happen.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Thanks but the same thing was said about WASM and ASM.JS. For 5 years we've been hearing about how great they are, except nobody is really using them. So now, it's 'the next thing' that will make it great? Except that next thing isn't there, not agreed upon or implemented, we don't know so many things about it? Like I say, this is textbook example of tech-hype for things probably not as valuable as they appear. If (huge if) WASI were 'great, functional, widespread, smoothly integrated' - I do agree there's more potential. But that this will really happen is questionable, and that even if it does happen, it will be valuable, is questionable.
duckfruit 6y ago
I want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential, however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove me wrong, in fact I'd love to be! Thats whats so engaging about discussions here. I'd love to see examples of what WebAssembly makes possible that wouldn't exist without it.)
- mbzi 6y ago
  An example I can give: I use WebAssembly for a few cross-platform plugins. E.g. An AR 3D rendering engine in C++ and OpenGL. With very little effort it is working in browser. No bespoke code, same business logic, etc. Saved a lot of time vs creating a new renderer for our web app. For me it allows a suite of curated plugins which work cross-platform. The web experience is nearly just as nice as the native mobile and desktop experience. This in turn increases market growth as more of my clients prefer web vs downloading an app (which is a large blocker for my users). I also enjoy the code reuse, maintainability, etc, :) Another: This year Max Factor (via Holition Beauty tech) won a Webby award for in-browser AI and AR. This was used to scan a users face, analyse their features, advise them on what make up, etc, would suit them, after which the user can try it on. This would have been impossible without WebAssembly. This tech is also used by another makeup brands beauty advisors (via WebRTC) to call a customer and in real-time advise them on their make up look, etc. Is this tech necessary? Probably not, but it is a lot nicer than having to go to a store. Especially when we are all in lockdown :) 1) https://www.holitionbeauty.com/ https://www.holitionbeauty.com/ 2) https://winners.webbyawards.com/?_ga=2.215422039.1334936414.1590199362-1324160623.1585863064#/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/apps-mobile-sites-general/fashion-beauty-lifestyle/111813/my-make-up-artist https://winners.webbyawards.com/?_ga=2.215422039.1334936414.... 3) https://www.maxfactor.com/vmua/ https://www.maxfactor.com/vmua/
  - tylerlarson 6y ago
    I build a slower version of something with the same idea 13-14 years ago in Flash for http://www.makeoversolutions.com http://www.makeoversolutions.com which most of these makeup companies licensed back then. I moved on from that a decade ago but it was a neat project at the time. But I deployed my first integration of WASM about a month ago for PaperlessPost.com. It is a custom h264 video decoder that renders into a canvas that manages timing relative to other graphics layers over this video. This code works around a series of bugs we've found with the built in video player. It went smoothly enough that we are looking into a few other hot spots in our code that could also be improved with WASM. One avenue for WASM might be simply polyfilling the features that are not consistently implemented across browsers.
jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
Wasm was not designed to be a hardware accelerated ISA. It was designed as an IL/bytecode target like JVM and .NET. Even if it were, there is an extremely high bar to meet for actual new ISAs/cores. There is no chance for Wasm to compete with RISC-V, Arm or x86.
chx 6y ago
> It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications, embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, Imagine if the crowd didn't fall for the HODL hypers and called these things cryptolotteries or something like that -- they are a betting game after all -- how ridiculous would it look to include them in every discussion like this.
- Sargos 6y ago
  What are you adding to the discussion? This is a technical forum, the least you could do is comment on the use of Web Assembly in Ethereum or maybe anything of substance. There's a bunch of technically interesting topics to bring up but somehow I doubt you know anything about them.
  - chx 6y ago
    I speak up against cryptocurrency because it's a cancer. It's a hype adding to climate change without any real world use case whatsoever.
    - Sargos 6y ago
      Have you looked deeper than just hodl memes and Bitcoin? Ethereum is a highly technical project that doesn't really care about money and lots of people here on Hacker News find interesting topics regarding it. Web Assembly will be the base programming platform for example, which is one of the reasons he included it. If you read about the Baseline protocol (EY, Microsoft, SAP etc building neutral interconnections between consortiums), ENS/IPFS, or digital identity systems you might find something that interests you and is more relevant than the mindless hodl ancaps. It's actually a pretty exciting field to be in as a computer scientist with almost no end of boundary pushing experiments and cryptographic primitives to play with and build on top of.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      Most new cryptocurrencies are moving away from PoW because a.) it's a massive waste of electricity and b.) it's not actually secure anyway, because we've seen a consolidation of mining power with major ASIC customers who have cheap power costs (notably in China). Ethereum's moving to it in 2020 or 2021, and EOS, Stellar, Tezos, Cardano, etc. are already PoS or derivatives.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
entha_saava 6y ago
I don't like to see wasm replacing native for stuff like development tooling, and desktop apps. JITs may approach native performance in theory - but the battery consumption and memory consumption are not very good. ("Better than JS" is a low bar). As hardware becomes stronger, I would like to do more with it, and when it comes to portable devices, I want more battery life. Nothing justifies compiling same code again and again, or downloading pages again and again like "web apps" shit. I understand where developer productivity argument comes from. But we can have both efficiency and developer productivity - it is a problem with webshit-grade stacks that are used today that you can't have both. I personally think flutter model is future. You need not strive for "build once - run anywhere". You can write once and build anywhere a cross platform HLL and that's better. As for sandboxing, maybe it is that your OS sucks (I say this as linux user); Android / iOS have sandboxing with native code. You shouldn't need to waste energy and RAM for security. IMO enforcing W^X along with permission based sandboxing is better than webassembly bullshit that is pushed. And webassembly itself seems to be a rudimentary project with over ambitious goals. JS bridge being so slow and not having GC support ("To be designed" state) make it unusable for many purpose. Outside HN echo chamber, not many web people want to write in rust or even C++.
- anewvillager 6y ago
  > I don't like to see wasm replacing native for stuff like development tooling, and desktop apps. Wasm is like the JVM or CLR in that regard. It's not the future - it's the past.
  - entha_saava 6y ago
    Yes. Even if there were a number of dominant architectures, install-time compilation would be better than run-time compilation for frequently used software. The RAM and Energy overhead isn't just worth it.
- mbzi 6y ago
  When dealing with Health or Military systems installing or updating a native application could result in months of delays (e.g. quarterly OS image update cycles). However running within Chrome, Firefox, and other typical software preinstalled, this becomes <days for implementation. Without WebAssembly I wouldn't have been able to ship 2 products pro-bono within intensive care units and operating theatres directly helping with COVID. I understand your dislike towards WebAssembly (albeit Web stack trends / flavour of the month esque development). I am not the largest fan of modern web development. Nevertheless love for WebAssembly is not due to developer productivity. After shipping 20+ WebAssembly products (alongside native counterparts) I am yet to meet an Engineer who enjoyed the WebAssembly/Emscripten/Blazor pipeline. However what WebAssembly has achieved for me is: Do people use your app? and within certain markets it allowed me to grow, do good, and say yes. This is the only real reason why someone should go down this route.
RedShift1 6y ago
Aaah so we have come full circle from Java applets.

by gpm 6y ago

lukevp 6y ago

I agree! WASM is very interesting. Blazor is an exciting example of an application of Web Assembly - it's starting out as .net in the browser, but you can imagine a lightweight wasm version of the .net runtime could be used in a lot of places as a sandboxed runtime. The main .net runtime is not really meant to run unprivileged. It would be more like the UWP concept that MS made to sandbox apps for the windows App Store, but applicable to all OSes. One thing I haven't heard much about is the packaging of wasm runtimes. For example, instead of including all of the .net runtime as scripts that need to be downloaded, we could have canonical releases of major libraries pre-installed in our browsers, and could even have the browser have pre-warmed runtimes ready to execute, in theory. So if we wanted to have a really fast startup time for .net, my browser could transparently cache a runtime. Basically like CDN references to JS files, but for entire language runtimes. This would obviate the need for browsers to natively support language runtimes. It's conceptually a way to get back to something like Flash or SilverLight but with a super simple fallback that doesn't require any plugin to be installed.

catmanjan 6y ago
I look forward to in browser DLL hell /s I'm cautiously optimistic about blazor, it definitely makes streaming data to the Dom much easier
- k__ 6y ago
  Blazor seems like the only one application of WASM at the moment that goes in the completely wrong direction. People are already whining about JS bundle size and even the small .net runtimes are >60kb. Yew on the other hand seems to fit right into what WebAssembly was made for.
  - rogihee 6y ago
    The download size does make it hard to use for a "public" site, like a webshop. But it is a different story for an application, like an intranet solution or app like Figma. A first time download of a few MB's is not a problem, as you regularly use it. Like a desktop application. It is the first time you can develop a full stack application (client and backend) in one language in one debugging session. For C# that was possible with Silverlight. Small companies (like mine) that deliver applications and have full stack engineers can have some amazing productivity! So for my needs I'm really excited with something like Blazor, and this was only the first release.
    - k__ 6y ago
      I understand the appeal for .net devs. I just don't think it's a good idea in general.
  - blackoil 6y ago
    For every person whining about 60k JS there are 10 creating 10MB web app.

als0 6y ago

Cautionary tale: we’ve been here before with JVM CPUs like Jazelle. They didn’t take over the world.

gpm 6y ago
Absolutely, but there's been plenty of technologies where the time wasn't right the first time around, but it was the second, or third, or fourth.
scarface74 6y ago
Even closer to home. Palm, RIM, Microsoft, Apple and Google have all said at one point that web apps were the answer for mobile apps....
- ethbro 6y ago
  I mean, modern Google was half-built on the back of the Gmail web app...
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Gmail was introduced after Google was already popular. The Google home page’s claim to fame was always its simplicity and fast load time.
    - ethbro 6y ago
      To an average user, Google in 2003 was a search page. In 2004+, it was essential internet infrastructure. That's a pretty big difference.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Gmail is popular but in the grand scheme of things it’s not that popular for email. I’m sure that most people get most of their utility from email from their corporate email. Their personal email is mostly used for distant relationship type communications. Most personal interactions these days happen via messaging and social media. AKA “Email is for old people”. Also, a lot of computer use is via mobile these days and I doubt too many people are using the web interface on mobile for gmail.

hackcasual 6y ago

I'd argue somewhat the opposite. Because WebAssembly is abstract but low level, it makes it really easy for a platform to optimize specifically for that platform, so instead of creating a need for specific platforms, it'll allow more diverse systems to run the same "native" blobs.

jariel 6y ago

That potentiality has been there for many many years, I don't see 'the thing' that provides the critical mass necessary to make it work in reality. Web Assembly is one of the more misunderstood technologies in terms of it's real, practical application. At its core, it crunches numbers, in limited memory space. So this can provide some 'performance enhancements' possibly for running some kinds of algorithms. It means you can also write those in C/C++, or port them. Autodesk does this for some online viewers. This is actually a surprisingly narrow area of application and it still comes with a lot of complexity. WA is a black box with no access to anything and how useful really is that? Most of an app is drawing 'stuff' on the screen, storage, networking, user event management, fonts, image, videos - that's literally what apps are. The notion of adding 'black box for calculating stuff more quickly' is a major afterthought. At the end of the day, JS keeps improving quite a lot and does pretty well, it might make more sense to have a variation of this that can be even more optimized than building something ground up. WASI - the standard WA interface is a neat project, but I feel it may come along with some serious security headaches. Once you 'break out of the black box' ... well ... it's no longer a 'black box'. WA will be a perennially interesting technology and maybe the best example of something that looks obviously useful but in reality isn't really. WA actually serves as a really great Product Manager's instructional example to articulate 'what things actually create value and why'. It will be interesting to see how far we get with WASI.

cdcarter 6y ago
I think you're underestimating WASI. Projects like cloudABI, where an existing app is compiled against a libc with strong sandboxing, really cool things happen.
- jariel 6y ago
  Thanks but the same thing was said about WASM and ASM.JS. For 5 years we've been hearing about how great they are, except nobody is really using them. So now, it's 'the next thing' that will make it great? Except that next thing isn't there, not agreed upon or implemented, we don't know so many things about it? Like I say, this is textbook example of tech-hype for things probably not as valuable as they appear. If (huge if) WASI were 'great, functional, widespread, smoothly integrated' - I do agree there's more potential. But that this will really happen is questionable, and that even if it does happen, it will be valuable, is questionable.

duckfruit 6y ago

I want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential, however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove me wrong, in fact I'd love to be! Thats whats so engaging about discussions here. I'd love to see examples of what WebAssembly makes possible that wouldn't exist without it.)

mbzi 6y ago
An example I can give: I use WebAssembly for a few cross-platform plugins. E.g. An AR 3D rendering engine in C++ and OpenGL. With very little effort it is working in browser. No bespoke code, same business logic, etc. Saved a lot of time vs creating a new renderer for our web app. For me it allows a suite of curated plugins which work cross-platform. The web experience is nearly just as nice as the native mobile and desktop experience. This in turn increases market growth as more of my clients prefer web vs downloading an app (which is a large blocker for my users). I also enjoy the code reuse, maintainability, etc, :) Another: This year Max Factor (via Holition Beauty tech) won a Webby award for in-browser AI and AR. This was used to scan a users face, analyse their features, advise them on what make up, etc, would suit them, after which the user can try it on. This would have been impossible without WebAssembly. This tech is also used by another makeup brands beauty advisors (via WebRTC) to call a customer and in real-time advise them on their make up look, etc. Is this tech necessary? Probably not, but it is a lot nicer than having to go to a store. Especially when we are all in lockdown :) 1) https://www.holitionbeauty.com/ https://www.holitionbeauty.com/ 2) https://winners.webbyawards.com/?_ga=2.215422039.1334936414.1590199362-1324160623.1585863064#/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/apps-mobile-sites-general/fashion-beauty-lifestyle/111813/my-make-up-artist https://winners.webbyawards.com/?_ga=2.215422039.1334936414.... 3) https://www.maxfactor.com/vmua/ https://www.maxfactor.com/vmua/
- tylerlarson 6y ago
  I build a slower version of something with the same idea 13-14 years ago in Flash for http://www.makeoversolutions.com http://www.makeoversolutions.com which most of these makeup companies licensed back then. I moved on from that a decade ago but it was a neat project at the time. But I deployed my first integration of WASM about a month ago for PaperlessPost.com. It is a custom h264 video decoder that renders into a canvas that manages timing relative to other graphics layers over this video. This code works around a series of bugs we've found with the built in video player. It went smoothly enough that we are looking into a few other hot spots in our code that could also be improved with WASM. One avenue for WASM might be simply polyfilling the features that are not consistently implemented across browsers.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago

Wasm was not designed to be a hardware accelerated ISA. It was designed as an IL/bytecode target like JVM and .NET. Even if it were, there is an extremely high bar to meet for actual new ISAs/cores. There is no chance for Wasm to compete with RISC-V, Arm or x86.

chx 6y ago

> It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications, embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, Imagine if the crowd didn't fall for the HODL hypers and called these things cryptolotteries or something like that -- they are a betting game after all -- how ridiculous would it look to include them in every discussion like this.

Sargos 6y ago
What are you adding to the discussion? This is a technical forum, the least you could do is comment on the use of Web Assembly in Ethereum or maybe anything of substance. There's a bunch of technically interesting topics to bring up but somehow I doubt you know anything about them.
- chx 6y ago
  I speak up against cryptocurrency because it's a cancer. It's a hype adding to climate change without any real world use case whatsoever.
  - Sargos 6y ago
    Have you looked deeper than just hodl memes and Bitcoin? Ethereum is a highly technical project that doesn't really care about money and lots of people here on Hacker News find interesting topics regarding it. Web Assembly will be the base programming platform for example, which is one of the reasons he included it. If you read about the Baseline protocol (EY, Microsoft, SAP etc building neutral interconnections between consortiums), ENS/IPFS, or digital identity systems you might find something that interests you and is more relevant than the mindless hodl ancaps. It's actually a pretty exciting field to be in as a computer scientist with almost no end of boundary pushing experiments and cryptographic primitives to play with and build on top of.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Most new cryptocurrencies are moving away from PoW because a.) it's a massive waste of electricity and b.) it's not actually secure anyway, because we've seen a consolidation of mining power with major ASIC customers who have cheap power costs (notably in China). Ethereum's moving to it in 2020 or 2021, and EOS, Stellar, Tezos, Cardano, etc. are already PoS or derivatives.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

entha_saava 6y ago

I don't like to see wasm replacing native for stuff like development tooling, and desktop apps. JITs may approach native performance in theory - but the battery consumption and memory consumption are not very good. ("Better than JS" is a low bar). As hardware becomes stronger, I would like to do more with it, and when it comes to portable devices, I want more battery life. Nothing justifies compiling same code again and again, or downloading pages again and again like "web apps" shit. I understand where developer productivity argument comes from. But we can have both efficiency and developer productivity - it is a problem with webshit-grade stacks that are used today that you can't have both. I personally think flutter model is future. You need not strive for "build once - run anywhere". You can write once and build anywhere a cross platform HLL and that's better. As for sandboxing, maybe it is that your OS sucks (I say this as linux user); Android / iOS have sandboxing with native code. You shouldn't need to waste energy and RAM for security. IMO enforcing W^X along with permission based sandboxing is better than webassembly bullshit that is pushed. And webassembly itself seems to be a rudimentary project with over ambitious goals. JS bridge being so slow and not having GC support ("To be designed" state) make it unusable for many purpose. Outside HN echo chamber, not many web people want to write in rust or even C++.

anewvillager 6y ago
> I don't like to see wasm replacing native for stuff like development tooling, and desktop apps. Wasm is like the JVM or CLR in that regard. It's not the future - it's the past.
- entha_saava 6y ago
  Yes. Even if there were a number of dominant architectures, install-time compilation would be better than run-time compilation for frequently used software. The RAM and Energy overhead isn't just worth it.
mbzi 6y ago
When dealing with Health or Military systems installing or updating a native application could result in months of delays (e.g. quarterly OS image update cycles). However running within Chrome, Firefox, and other typical software preinstalled, this becomes <days for implementation. Without WebAssembly I wouldn't have been able to ship 2 products pro-bono within intensive care units and operating theatres directly helping with COVID. I understand your dislike towards WebAssembly (albeit Web stack trends / flavour of the month esque development). I am not the largest fan of modern web development. Nevertheless love for WebAssembly is not due to developer productivity. After shipping 20+ WebAssembly products (alongside native counterparts) I am yet to meet an Engineer who enjoyed the WebAssembly/Emscripten/Blazor pipeline. However what WebAssembly has achieved for me is: Do people use your app? and within certain markets it allowed me to grow, do good, and say yes. This is the only real reason why someone should go down this route.

RedShift1 6y ago

Aaah so we have come full circle from Java applets.