19 ms·

What is the state of the world with wasm at this point? It seems like it's been this huge tease for 10 years now, promising that we'll be able to build web apps

What is the state of the world with wasm at this point? It seems like it's been this huge tease for 10 years now, promising that we'll be able to build web apps in any language. But as far as I'm aware, garbage collection and DOM access is still nonexistent.

arthurcolle 5y ago
Wish I had a RemindMe! bot on HN for comments like these.
Hydraulix989 5y ago
There's no garbage collection in WASM. Why do you think that there is garbage collection in WASM? And WASM has been around since 2017, which is only 4 years, not 10 years... Bitcoin has been around much longer (~12 years), for example.
- sound_and_form 5y ago
  It's a spec proposal. https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...
  - Hydraulix989 5y ago
    Yes, and this is just an extension. Existing WASM compiler front-ends for non-GC languages don't have to necessarily use it. Wasm itself still won't take a performance hit, unless individual devs opt in by using front-ends for GC languages.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  Emscripten hit 1.0.1 around November 2012 (looked it up on GitHub) So if wasm is the spiritual successor to Emscripten's "Compile C to JavaScript and run C in a browser" then it's only 8 years.
  - Hydraulix989 5y ago
    I mean, you can keep playing this game and take Microsoft ActiveX or Google NaCl as another spiritual successor. I maintain that WASM has been around for 3 years.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
Well built in garbage collection is non-existent. You can definitely use languages with GCs, you just need to include the GC in the bundle. You can do DOM access as well, it's just not particularly efficient. Overall I think WebAssembly definitely has some usecases, they're just not as visible as people expected. Sites like Figma or Lichess use WASM but not in a super flashy way.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  I'm optimistic dom access will get better soon. Check out https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/fast-bump-allocated-virtual-doms-with-rust-and-wasm/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/fast-bump-allocated-virtua... for example.
mbzi 5y ago
Good question, still a "green" technology but I have had great successes with it for the past 4-5 years in production (ASM.JS before widespread WASM compatibility). "promising that we'll be able to build web apps in any language" is not how I see WASM, nor is it really used in this way outside of transpiling Unity3D/Unreal games (this may be the one area there is an exception). I use it to transpile C++ to WASM libraries used within React apps, Edge Lambdas, and Node.JS servers. Primarily down to 2 reasons: speed and efficiency. WASM unlocks excellence and resources in other disciplines/languages such as AI and AR tool chains, Engineers, OpenCV, etc. When used like this, it is outstanding. What WASM will never be good at is being used for the whole experience. You lose the semantic web, and/or accessibility tooling. Web has some outstanding guidelines and frameworks to help the impaired, screen readers and the like. Using WASM to pump a native app into a HTMLCanvasElement will lose all of these advances, therefore, WASM shouldn't be used for this use case (outside of games). Like all tooling, there is a time and a place to use them. Below are a few links which use WASM in production: https://holition.com/play/holition-brings-home-twenty-awards-at-the-2021-muse-creative-awards https://holition.com/play/holition-brings-home-twenty-awards... https://winners.webbyawards.com/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/apps-mobile-sites-general/fashion-beauty-lifestyle/111813/my-make-up-artist https://winners.webbyawards.com/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/a... https://www.youniqueproducts.com/beautyguide#.YIS9hOhKguU https://www.youniqueproducts.com/beautyguide#.YIS9hOhKguU https://www.charlottetilbury.com/us/products/charlottes-virtual-online-makeup-try-on https://www.charlottetilbury.com/us/products/charlottes-virt... https://visagetechnologies.com/demo/ https://visagetechnologies.com/demo/
- brundolf 5y ago
  > "promising that we'll be able to build web apps in any language" is not how I see WASM Unfortunately it kind of got branded this way for people who aren't close to the front-end industry. There's a segment out there who would like to write web apps but aren't willing to touch JavaScript with a ten-foot pole, and their hopes were gotten up that WASM would give them that. It's not exactly a lie, but it has so many asterisks that it may as well be. In practice, the reality is that JS will continue to be the only first-class language for the web. WASM has many uses, some on the web and some outside of it, but the closer your app is to the DOM and to the browser as a platform, the less likely it is that you'll ever be able to pretend JS doesn't exist.
paulgb 5y ago
DOM access is possible with a bit of boilerplate to make the WASM aware of the APIs. In Rust, crates like js-sys and wasm-bindgen automate most of this. Rust also has the Yew framework, which is surprisingly nice to work with given that Rust is not a frontend language and it only uses the built-in macro system rather than a preprosessor like JSX.
reader_mode 5y ago
TBH DOM is garbage for building apps, but if you need to use it it's clear that it's built for JavaScript. TypeScript made JS manageable and there's so much work in the JS ecosystem arround DOM interaction, I sincerely doubt you'll see anything come out of this. I haven't looked at Blazor/MAUI but having experienced MS frontend tech in Silverlight and Xamarin, I'll take the JS/DOM any day. Ideally WASM would expose lower level APIs and then we can start treating the browser as the app sandbox that it is (in the case of buildign apps).
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  You would love Svelte. It makes the entire web ecosystem look and feel like the dark ages in comparison.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Svelte made me want to have time to write a new Common Lisp framework. Really, that's how one should look like, at least as far as the results on the client side are concerned.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
It probably needs a killer app. To me it feels like it's a solution looking for a problem.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  WASM alredy got a killer app: being able to run any snippet of any language in a browser. For teaching programming, it's use, because projects like pyiodine can load a full python vm in a the browser and let the student experiment with the snippet without taking the risk of ruining my server.
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  Figma is pretty killer
- CharlesW 5y ago
  Pyodide is pretty amazing. https://pyodide.org/en/stable/ https://pyodide.org/en/stable/
pjmlp 5y ago
It is stuck in MVP 1.0 capabilities, still years away to reach out the capabilities of Flash/CodeAlchemy and PNaCL in 2021, while tools like Emscripten feel like stone age technology, where you need to mount Lego pieces by yourself.
jokoon 5y ago
In my view, the DOM is too cluttered and bloated, difficult to work with if you're a browser. There are a lot of things that should be made deprecated, but it's difficult to decide which things, since big browser are usually rivals (apple, google, microsoft, mozilla...). Browsers are already pretty complex machines, considering javascript and the DOM and everything that comes along. Expecting all browser to let WASM have access to the DOM is a big demand.
pansa2 5y ago
> in any language Is anyone using a language other than C, C++ or Rust to target Wasm? Many other languages seem to have experimental support - but are any of them ready for production, or even making significant progress towards being ready?
- nikeee 5y ago
  There is Blazor, which compiles C# ASP.NET-like code to a client-side application that runs on wasm. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazor
- sneeuwpopsneeuw 5y ago
  Go also has good support and Java has http://teavm.org/ http://teavm.org/ and JWebAssembly. There is also the general https://wasmer.io/ https://wasmer.io/ for using web-assembly in any language. They claim they have good support for other languages like Python and PHP but I personally never tested that.
jedisct1 5y ago
The priorities seem to have shifted, with most standardization efforts being focused on running WebAssembly on the server, rather than web browsers. Flutter and Blazor are exceptions, but they had to reinvent everything their own way. Regarding languages, the landscape is pretty much limited to Rust (when using compatible crates), Zig, TinyGo, AssemblyScript and C# (with Blazor). The specification started with something very simple but keeps getting more and more complicated, not to mention breaking changes, that don’t encourage writing tooling for it. At least not until things settle a little bit.
zackees 5y ago
Funny story, in 2013 I was working for the Google Earth team. A new clean slate version of Google Earth was in the works (which has been released since) and this was at the time that wonderful demos were being made with asm.js I convinced one of the engineers to try compiling it in emscripten. It was a total success, running at 45 fps. The middle manager got so excited about this that he decided to make a full push for this version of google earth to be used since it was truly cross platform product running in the browser at near native speed. The portable Native client / webassembly team caught wind that this was happening and convinced management to kill the project. The middle manager who was overly excited about this technology, was also let go. All this to make way for web assembly which was “right around the corner” but actually wasn’t (back in 2013). Today web assembly is essentially doing the same thing that asm.js was doing 8 years ago. If Google had not messed up this decision it would have really been a trailblazer for other companies to follow suit.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  Lol! The funny thing is that at that point, the code you were shipping was "just javascript" but in a machine generated format. When places go out of their way to tell you about their engineering culture, they often aren't.

arthurcolle 5y ago

Wish I had a RemindMe! bot on HN for comments like these.

Hydraulix989 5y ago

There's no garbage collection in WASM. Why do you think that there is garbage collection in WASM? And WASM has been around since 2017, which is only 4 years, not 10 years... Bitcoin has been around much longer (~12 years), for example.

sound_and_form 5y ago
It's a spec proposal. https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...
- Hydraulix989 5y ago
  Yes, and this is just an extension. Existing WASM compiler front-ends for non-GC languages don't have to necessarily use it. Wasm itself still won't take a performance hit, unless individual devs opt in by using front-ends for GC languages.
ReactiveJelly 5y ago
Emscripten hit 1.0.1 around November 2012 (looked it up on GitHub) So if wasm is the spiritual successor to Emscripten's "Compile C to JavaScript and run C in a browser" then it's only 8 years.
- Hydraulix989 5y ago
  I mean, you can keep playing this game and take Microsoft ActiveX or Google NaCl as another spiritual successor. I maintain that WASM has been around for 3 years.

hardwaregeek 5y ago

Well built in garbage collection is non-existent. You can definitely use languages with GCs, you just need to include the GC in the bundle. You can do DOM access as well, it's just not particularly efficient. Overall I think WebAssembly definitely has some usecases, they're just not as visible as people expected. Sites like Figma or Lichess use WASM but not in a super flashy way.

iudqnolq 5y ago
I'm optimistic dom access will get better soon. Check out https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/fast-bump-allocated-virtual-doms-with-rust-and-wasm/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/fast-bump-allocated-virtua... for example.

mbzi 5y ago

Good question, still a "green" technology but I have had great successes with it for the past 4-5 years in production (ASM.JS before widespread WASM compatibility). "promising that we'll be able to build web apps in any language" is not how I see WASM, nor is it really used in this way outside of transpiling Unity3D/Unreal games (this may be the one area there is an exception). I use it to transpile C++ to WASM libraries used within React apps, Edge Lambdas, and Node.JS servers. Primarily down to 2 reasons: speed and efficiency. WASM unlocks excellence and resources in other disciplines/languages such as AI and AR tool chains, Engineers, OpenCV, etc. When used like this, it is outstanding. What WASM will never be good at is being used for the whole experience. You lose the semantic web, and/or accessibility tooling. Web has some outstanding guidelines and frameworks to help the impaired, screen readers and the like. Using WASM to pump a native app into a HTMLCanvasElement will lose all of these advances, therefore, WASM shouldn't be used for this use case (outside of games). Like all tooling, there is a time and a place to use them. Below are a few links which use WASM in production: https://holition.com/play/holition-brings-home-twenty-awards-at-the-2021-muse-creative-awards https://holition.com/play/holition-brings-home-twenty-awards... https://winners.webbyawards.com/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/apps-mobile-sites-general/fashion-beauty-lifestyle/111813/my-make-up-artist https://winners.webbyawards.com/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/a... https://www.youniqueproducts.com/beautyguide#.YIS9hOhKguU https://www.youniqueproducts.com/beautyguide#.YIS9hOhKguU https://www.charlottetilbury.com/us/products/charlottes-virtual-online-makeup-try-on https://www.charlottetilbury.com/us/products/charlottes-virt... https://visagetechnologies.com/demo/ https://visagetechnologies.com/demo/

brundolf 5y ago
> "promising that we'll be able to build web apps in any language" is not how I see WASM Unfortunately it kind of got branded this way for people who aren't close to the front-end industry. There's a segment out there who would like to write web apps but aren't willing to touch JavaScript with a ten-foot pole, and their hopes were gotten up that WASM would give them that. It's not exactly a lie, but it has so many asterisks that it may as well be. In practice, the reality is that JS will continue to be the only first-class language for the web. WASM has many uses, some on the web and some outside of it, but the closer your app is to the DOM and to the browser as a platform, the less likely it is that you'll ever be able to pretend JS doesn't exist.

paulgb 5y ago

DOM access is possible with a bit of boilerplate to make the WASM aware of the APIs. In Rust, crates like js-sys and wasm-bindgen automate most of this. Rust also has the Yew framework, which is surprisingly nice to work with given that Rust is not a frontend language and it only uses the built-in macro system rather than a preprosessor like JSX.

reader_mode 5y ago

TBH DOM is garbage for building apps, but if you need to use it it's clear that it's built for JavaScript. TypeScript made JS manageable and there's so much work in the JS ecosystem arround DOM interaction, I sincerely doubt you'll see anything come out of this. I haven't looked at Blazor/MAUI but having experienced MS frontend tech in Silverlight and Xamarin, I'll take the JS/DOM any day. Ideally WASM would expose lower level APIs and then we can start treating the browser as the app sandbox that it is (in the case of buildign apps).

FractalHQ 5y ago
You would love Svelte. It makes the entire web ecosystem look and feel like the dark ages in comparison.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Svelte made me want to have time to write a new Common Lisp framework. Really, that's how one should look like, at least as far as the results on the client side are concerned.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

It probably needs a killer app. To me it feels like it's a solution looking for a problem.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
WASM alredy got a killer app: being able to run any snippet of any language in a browser. For teaching programming, it's use, because projects like pyiodine can load a full python vm in a the browser and let the student experiment with the snippet without taking the risk of ruining my server.
FractalHQ 5y ago
Figma is pretty killer
CharlesW 5y ago
Pyodide is pretty amazing. https://pyodide.org/en/stable/ https://pyodide.org/en/stable/

pjmlp 5y ago

It is stuck in MVP 1.0 capabilities, still years away to reach out the capabilities of Flash/CodeAlchemy and PNaCL in 2021, while tools like Emscripten feel like stone age technology, where you need to mount Lego pieces by yourself.

jokoon 5y ago

In my view, the DOM is too cluttered and bloated, difficult to work with if you're a browser. There are a lot of things that should be made deprecated, but it's difficult to decide which things, since big browser are usually rivals (apple, google, microsoft, mozilla...). Browsers are already pretty complex machines, considering javascript and the DOM and everything that comes along. Expecting all browser to let WASM have access to the DOM is a big demand.

pansa2 5y ago

> in any language Is anyone using a language other than C, C++ or Rust to target Wasm? Many other languages seem to have experimental support - but are any of them ready for production, or even making significant progress towards being ready?

nikeee 5y ago
There is Blazor, which compiles C# ASP.NET-like code to a client-side application that runs on wasm. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazor
sneeuwpopsneeuw 5y ago
Go also has good support and Java has http://teavm.org/ http://teavm.org/ and JWebAssembly. There is also the general https://wasmer.io/ https://wasmer.io/ for using web-assembly in any language. They claim they have good support for other languages like Python and PHP but I personally never tested that.

jedisct1 5y ago

The priorities seem to have shifted, with most standardization efforts being focused on running WebAssembly on the server, rather than web browsers. Flutter and Blazor are exceptions, but they had to reinvent everything their own way. Regarding languages, the landscape is pretty much limited to Rust (when using compatible crates), Zig, TinyGo, AssemblyScript and C# (with Blazor). The specification started with something very simple but keeps getting more and more complicated, not to mention breaking changes, that don’t encourage writing tooling for it. At least not until things settle a little bit.

zackees 5y ago

Funny story, in 2013 I was working for the Google Earth team. A new clean slate version of Google Earth was in the works (which has been released since) and this was at the time that wonderful demos were being made with asm.js I convinced one of the engineers to try compiling it in emscripten. It was a total success, running at 45 fps. The middle manager got so excited about this that he decided to make a full push for this version of google earth to be used since it was truly cross platform product running in the browser at near native speed. The portable Native client / webassembly team caught wind that this was happening and convinced management to kill the project. The middle manager who was overly excited about this technology, was also let go. All this to make way for web assembly which was “right around the corner” but actually wasn’t (back in 2013). Today web assembly is essentially doing the same thing that asm.js was doing 8 years ago. If Google had not messed up this decision it would have really been a trailblazer for other companies to follow suit.

seg_lol 5y ago
Lol! The funny thing is that at that point, the code you were shipping was "just javascript" but in a machine generated format. When places go out of their way to tell you about their engineering culture, they often aren't.