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This is something that I wanted to hear more from people invested in frontend. I work exclusively as a DevOps/DataOps/Backend engineer and have little contact

This is something that I wanted to hear more from people invested in frontend. I work exclusively as a DevOps/DataOps/Backend engineer and have little contact with stuff running in the browser. I did, however, work with AngularJS back in the day, and although the framework itself didn't lend itself to nicely to productivity and simplicity, I believe that what I found most confusing was how unergonomic the browser environment itself was, from not dealing with a filesystem (and thus having to resort to tricks like transpiling and bundling) to the rather terse API, not having for instance a SQLite natively and not being able to enable something like this without bringing copious amounts of megabytes of extra javascript deps... Is the browser environment becoming more dev-friendly with the adoption of WebAssembly? I ask that because, in my opinion, if the browser itself doesn't evolve, it doesn't matter which language we use, interacting with it will still be a hassle. All in all, it feels like the browser advanced a lot in technology for optimization and resource management, but not so much in becoming more user-friendly to the developer.

Tade0 5y ago
> not having for instance a SQLite natively We had this for a brief moment in the form of Web SQL, but as a rule web standards require independent implementations to be developed, and all the implementors were using SQLite under the hood. The current alternative is IndexedDB - for better or worse. > Is the browser environment becoming more dev-friendly with the adoption of WebAssembly? Yes, but that doesn't have much to do with WebAssembly. JavaScript as a language evolved, we have TypeScript with its flexible and expressive type system and bundling is becoming less of a pain with each consecutive framework re-written using ES2015 modules(and loaded via e.g. Snowpack https://www.snowpack.dev/ https://www.snowpack.dev/). WebAssembly is helpful when there's a need for some heavy lifting - e.g. in software codecs, but that's still a niche application.
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  Technologies like TypeScript are still dependencies that require transpiling to vanilla JavaScript and add to the bundle size. While typescript is becoming more and more common (for good reason) it still is effectively a workaround that compensates for the unergonomic-ness of the browser environment. You could make the same argument for frameworks like Angular, React and Vue. If WebAssembly replaced js, then newer, more efficient browser languages could be invented. Like a new implementation of typescript could be created that is statically compiled and more efficient. All of this transpiling from x to js and y to css would be unnecessary.
  - bri3d 5y ago
    The "y to CSS" part would still be there - even with WebAssembly, your UI options are still pretty much the DOM (great for documents and form entry, not so great for applications) or canvas (too low level and loses platform consistency, accessibility, usability, really every affordance of an operating system).
    - peterthehacker 5y ago
      Good point. I was thinking of changing styles via DOM, like CSS-in-JS, but you’re right that “y to CSS” would still be there.
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      I'm going to ask an ignorant question and I'm sorry, but couldn't you basically write an application in web assembly, using OpenGL and creating whatever UI you wanted in there, and just use CSS for the scaffold? You'd only need a mobile and desktop web app, but you'd need one anyway, right? (Note.. I'm very obviously not a web developer, so forgive my naivete).
      - hnfong 5y ago
        Yes. For example: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-... But it's going to be a very "heavy" custom framework that takes time to download and load. Overkill in most cases.
        UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        Ok. Makes sense. Thanks =)
      - bri3d 5y ago
        That was my second option - canvas. WebGL is a type of HTML5 canvas context. Unfortunately, there are major drawbacks which I also outlined - it's too low level and loses platform consistency, accessibility, usability, and really every affordance of an operating system - you're starting over from scratch and loading in dependencies or writing your own implementation of some immensely challenging concepts (font rendering on its own is usually several hundred kb of code and could fill textbook upon textbook). If you're familiar with GL UI frameworks like dear-imgui, they do all work pretty well in WebAssembly. But again, they're compromised from the start because you lose all OS consistency and accessibility. And unlike in games, where these frameworks are often employed, OS consistency isn't expected, and accessibility is sadly ignored, the experience of a cross-platform UI framework appearing in a canvas element on the web becomes jarring very quickly. There is an alternative approach, like Google Docs employs and the sibling poster linked - combining the DOM for input elements with custom rendering. But, this is really, really complex and challenging. Every time I develop applications for the web, I yearn for an application-focused presentation layer which provides the expected fundamentals around accessibility, OS consistency, and rendering layout while ditching the hacks-on-hypertext minefield of CSS and the DOM.
tmm84 5y ago
The problem was WebAssembly despite what people think isn't a JS replacement. WebAssembly isn't designed to go after DOM manipulation and the rest of the browser world (in short, think calculating physics and heavy number crunching instead of whether or not some input with id blah is blank). The best analogy I can give is this, imagine using Lua and calling of compiled code (C/C++/Rust/etc), this is the JS/WebAssembly way of doing things. Does the web browser (an application for reading documents written in hypertext), need to evolve? Or, has the web browser been asked to do more than it should and we need a new type of application? So much of the internet is based around the fact that the basics of the web browser can't change (don't break the web!). If the basics can't change then maybe the need for a new standard where the basics fit the application is required.
- johnmaguire 5y ago
  What would you change?
- dmos62 5y ago
  The browser has been a system-within-a-system for a long time now. That's a pretty big problem, because it's inefficient computation-wise and has very low interoperability with the host system, which has big implications. The user also has sort of an upside: the browser, being isolated on the host machine, is very portable. And, maybe safer, but I'd argue against this point, because a monolith is too hard to audit; if you want security and correctness you need many small components, not one huge one. But, those are user problems. Big vendors enjoy non-interoperability, because it lets them do user lock-in and have monopolies. That's also why we hardly have medium-sized vendors: only gigantic and minuscule. If I had a magic wand, - I'd make Web maximally interoperable, give an API to everything: look up Youtube recommendations or listen to Spotify programmatically or from the command line; - introduce legislation to forbid non-interoperable for-profit (or infrastructure-level) software; otherwise businesses are incentivized to make walled gardens and lock-in users; e.g. no more countless chat apps; - get rid of Javascript: it creates too many security and fingerprinting problems, and, if everything has an API, you don't need it; - break up the browser into a composition of smallest independent components possible; it will get you `apt install facebook-local-events`; - get rid of password-based authentication: what a horrible idea that was; - get rid of any client-side possibility to track or fingerprint users; if you're making choices about what services to use or how, those choices can be fingerprinted, depending on some other things, but that's another matter; the other party should not be exposed to what hardware or software or configuration you use or how you use your peripherals; - introduce consumer and competition protection laws to bring software out of the wild wild west in terms of legislation. I've more or less described the destruction of Web as we know it, but also a creation of something much better, in my eyes. Doesn't sound very feasible, but that's what I'd do if I had a magic wand.
mr_toad 5y ago
Not having direct access to the file system or the network or to a database are because of the sandbox, not because of JavaScript. You can do all those things in Node. Web Assembly isn’t going to get rid of the sandbox.
- gchamonlive 5y ago
  You could have fakeroot, for instance: https://wiki.debian.org/FakeRoot https://wiki.debian.org/FakeRoot Sandbox doesn't imply not having a file system available (for example, for use in imports), I believe this is more of a historic limitation than a strictly technical one (just because we need the sandboxing concept). I know. Fakeroot is not strictly sandboxing, but I think it illustrates the point.

Tade0 5y ago

> not having for instance a SQLite natively We had this for a brief moment in the form of Web SQL, but as a rule web standards require independent implementations to be developed, and all the implementors were using SQLite under the hood. The current alternative is IndexedDB - for better or worse. > Is the browser environment becoming more dev-friendly with the adoption of WebAssembly? Yes, but that doesn't have much to do with WebAssembly. JavaScript as a language evolved, we have TypeScript with its flexible and expressive type system and bundling is becoming less of a pain with each consecutive framework re-written using ES2015 modules(and loaded via e.g. Snowpack https://www.snowpack.dev/ https://www.snowpack.dev/). WebAssembly is helpful when there's a need for some heavy lifting - e.g. in software codecs, but that's still a niche application.

peterthehacker 5y ago
Technologies like TypeScript are still dependencies that require transpiling to vanilla JavaScript and add to the bundle size. While typescript is becoming more and more common (for good reason) it still is effectively a workaround that compensates for the unergonomic-ness of the browser environment. You could make the same argument for frameworks like Angular, React and Vue. If WebAssembly replaced js, then newer, more efficient browser languages could be invented. Like a new implementation of typescript could be created that is statically compiled and more efficient. All of this transpiling from x to js and y to css would be unnecessary.
- bri3d 5y ago
  The "y to CSS" part would still be there - even with WebAssembly, your UI options are still pretty much the DOM (great for documents and form entry, not so great for applications) or canvas (too low level and loses platform consistency, accessibility, usability, really every affordance of an operating system).
  - peterthehacker 5y ago
    Good point. I was thinking of changing styles via DOM, like CSS-in-JS, but you’re right that “y to CSS” would still be there.
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    I'm going to ask an ignorant question and I'm sorry, but couldn't you basically write an application in web assembly, using OpenGL and creating whatever UI you wanted in there, and just use CSS for the scaffold? You'd only need a mobile and desktop web app, but you'd need one anyway, right? (Note.. I'm very obviously not a web developer, so forgive my naivete).
    - hnfong 5y ago
      Yes. For example: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-... But it's going to be a very "heavy" custom framework that takes time to download and load. Overkill in most cases.
      - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
        Ok. Makes sense. Thanks =)
    - bri3d 5y ago
      That was my second option - canvas. WebGL is a type of HTML5 canvas context. Unfortunately, there are major drawbacks which I also outlined - it's too low level and loses platform consistency, accessibility, usability, and really every affordance of an operating system - you're starting over from scratch and loading in dependencies or writing your own implementation of some immensely challenging concepts (font rendering on its own is usually several hundred kb of code and could fill textbook upon textbook). If you're familiar with GL UI frameworks like dear-imgui, they do all work pretty well in WebAssembly. But again, they're compromised from the start because you lose all OS consistency and accessibility. And unlike in games, where these frameworks are often employed, OS consistency isn't expected, and accessibility is sadly ignored, the experience of a cross-platform UI framework appearing in a canvas element on the web becomes jarring very quickly. There is an alternative approach, like Google Docs employs and the sibling poster linked - combining the DOM for input elements with custom rendering. But, this is really, really complex and challenging. Every time I develop applications for the web, I yearn for an application-focused presentation layer which provides the expected fundamentals around accessibility, OS consistency, and rendering layout while ditching the hacks-on-hypertext minefield of CSS and the DOM.

tmm84 5y ago

The problem was WebAssembly despite what people think isn't a JS replacement. WebAssembly isn't designed to go after DOM manipulation and the rest of the browser world (in short, think calculating physics and heavy number crunching instead of whether or not some input with id blah is blank). The best analogy I can give is this, imagine using Lua and calling of compiled code (C/C++/Rust/etc), this is the JS/WebAssembly way of doing things. Does the web browser (an application for reading documents written in hypertext), need to evolve? Or, has the web browser been asked to do more than it should and we need a new type of application? So much of the internet is based around the fact that the basics of the web browser can't change (don't break the web!). If the basics can't change then maybe the need for a new standard where the basics fit the application is required.

johnmaguire 5y ago
What would you change?
dmos62 5y ago
The browser has been a system-within-a-system for a long time now. That's a pretty big problem, because it's inefficient computation-wise and has very low interoperability with the host system, which has big implications. The user also has sort of an upside: the browser, being isolated on the host machine, is very portable. And, maybe safer, but I'd argue against this point, because a monolith is too hard to audit; if you want security and correctness you need many small components, not one huge one. But, those are user problems. Big vendors enjoy non-interoperability, because it lets them do user lock-in and have monopolies. That's also why we hardly have medium-sized vendors: only gigantic and minuscule. If I had a magic wand, - I'd make Web maximally interoperable, give an API to everything: look up Youtube recommendations or listen to Spotify programmatically or from the command line; - introduce legislation to forbid non-interoperable for-profit (or infrastructure-level) software; otherwise businesses are incentivized to make walled gardens and lock-in users; e.g. no more countless chat apps; - get rid of Javascript: it creates too many security and fingerprinting problems, and, if everything has an API, you don't need it; - break up the browser into a composition of smallest independent components possible; it will get you `apt install facebook-local-events`; - get rid of password-based authentication: what a horrible idea that was; - get rid of any client-side possibility to track or fingerprint users; if you're making choices about what services to use or how, those choices can be fingerprinted, depending on some other things, but that's another matter; the other party should not be exposed to what hardware or software or configuration you use or how you use your peripherals; - introduce consumer and competition protection laws to bring software out of the wild wild west in terms of legislation. I've more or less described the destruction of Web as we know it, but also a creation of something much better, in my eyes. Doesn't sound very feasible, but that's what I'd do if I had a magic wand.

mr_toad 5y ago

Not having direct access to the file system or the network or to a database are because of the sandbox, not because of JavaScript. You can do all those things in Node. Web Assembly isn’t going to get rid of the sandbox.

gchamonlive 5y ago
You could have fakeroot, for instance: https://wiki.debian.org/FakeRoot https://wiki.debian.org/FakeRoot Sandbox doesn't imply not having a file system available (for example, for use in imports), I believe this is more of a historic limitation than a strictly technical one (just because we need the sandboxing concept). I know. Fakeroot is not strictly sandboxing, but I think it illustrates the point.