4 ms·
Excuse my lack of expertise but I don't like web as a platform. Isn't it basically Javascript (an now WASM) + CSS on the client side and a browser as the VM? O
by gerash 5y ago
Excuse my lack of expertise but I don't like web as a platform. Isn't it basically Javascript (an now WASM) + CSS on the client side and a browser as the VM?
On all platforms web is a second class citizen and the feature set is the common denominator which means it's always lacking something. It doesn't have access to all the hardware, it runs in a VM (which I assume means it is slower) and the dev languages are meh.
I prefer something along the lines of what Fuschia promises. That is, ephemeral software that gets downloaded lazily and runs natively as a first class citizen of the underlying OS
- ozten 5y agoWASM is a new portable runtime with very few capabilities exposed, so it has a much better security model than the web's JavaScript engine. You write your code in any language and compile it to WASM. You inject capabilities such as file system access, network access, etc. There is no UI layer, so CSS has nothing to do with WASM. Although WASM was invented and developed primarily in the browser, it is now being deployed standalone by companies like Fastly that let you customize their CDN with WASM running at the edge of the cloud via point of presence (POP) data centers.
- immibis 5y agoThe CPU already offers a non-portable runtime with very few capabilities exposed. Then we exposed the capabilities and didn't provide a way to unexpose them. That was the mistake.
- ozten 5y agoAgreed that there are many ways to skin this cat. Operating Systems, Hypervisors, containers, Unikernels, etc. WASM is a very low level building block that you could build something like Docker out of, but it isn't a high level virtualization product.
- justshowpost 5y agoIf WASI gets GPU support, WASM can also replace HTML + CSS and make the browser essentially a thin compatibility layer for nearly native apps.