4 ms·

It's not that complex, anything in computers can seem complex if you're not familiar with it. I would suggest that you're just not familiar with it, and that's

It's not that complex, anything in computers can seem complex if you're not familiar with it. I would suggest that you're just not familiar with it, and that's not a knock against you, it's just something that you need to study like anything else. It's not true that you need a large team to do anything on the web these days, the same technology works today that has worked for the last two decades, but if you want to leverage the benefits of new technology you need to invest the time to understand how it works, that's just the nature of technological advancement.

rudi-c 6y ago
Parent mentioned the lack of tooling, and that is indeed where most of the cost of using WebAssembly lies. You don’t really need to learn the assembly language itself since you’ll probably just be calling emcc. However, you may need to build code to marshall more than just ints and strings to the JS code. Even after you do, you’ll run into the classical issues of keeping track of object references across a GC & non-GC system. You may need debugging and find that in-browser debuggers for WASM are primitive/non-existent. You may need to figure out how unmangle stack traces —- including mixed JS/WASM traces. Third-party tools like Sentry for error reporting may not have built support (they sort of recently have and is very under-documented). All solvable problems, but it’s a lot of time spent not building the product. There are plenty of good uses cases but it’s usually not the ones based on the false premise that native is somehow always better than interpreted.
- staticelf 6y ago
  Your answer is my thoughts perfectly put in text. Better explanation than what I could come up with myself. Thanks!
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Also, with wasm you are now dealing with memory leaks and hunting them down, is no fun at the moment.

rudi-c 6y ago

Parent mentioned the lack of tooling, and that is indeed where most of the cost of using WebAssembly lies. You don’t really need to learn the assembly language itself since you’ll probably just be calling emcc. However, you may need to build code to marshall more than just ints and strings to the JS code. Even after you do, you’ll run into the classical issues of keeping track of object references across a GC & non-GC system. You may need debugging and find that in-browser debuggers for WASM are primitive/non-existent. You may need to figure out how unmangle stack traces —- including mixed JS/WASM traces. Third-party tools like Sentry for error reporting may not have built support (they sort of recently have and is very under-documented). All solvable problems, but it’s a lot of time spent not building the product. There are plenty of good uses cases but it’s usually not the ones based on the false premise that native is somehow always better than interpreted.

staticelf 6y ago
Your answer is my thoughts perfectly put in text. Better explanation than what I could come up with myself. Thanks!
hutzlibu 6y ago
Also, with wasm you are now dealing with memory leaks and hunting them down, is no fun at the moment.