3 ms·

So you want to avoid the horrors of the web by inserting some language-warping piece of glue code that is guaranteed to only ever get in your way. The irony. I

So you want to avoid the horrors of the web by inserting some language-warping piece of glue code that is guaranteed to only ever get in your way. The irony. In any case, the DOM and CSS is like 90% of the reason to hate the basic web stack. The other 90% of the reason that people hate JavaScript for is the myriad of frameworks that some people opt to use. You don't have to, and if you come from C you will probably feel right at home not doing so.

gspr 4y ago
> So you want to avoid the horrors of the web by inserting some language-warping piece of glue code that is guaranteed to only ever get in your way. The irony. No, I in particular want to avoid glue code! > In any case, the DOM and CSS is like 90% of the reason to hate the basic web stack. The other 90% of the reason that people hate JavaScript for is the myriad of frameworks that some people opt to use. You don't have to, and if you come from C you will probably feel right at home not doing so. Perhaps. In my case, it's simply that I abhor the idea that this particular platform requires one specific langauge. I think that's rather dumb. I'd prefer to treat web browsers as just another platform. I do understand that this platform is a bit different from the classical ones (Linux, Windows, Mac, the other unices, take the cartesian product with hardware architectures if you want) in that it doesn't have a notion of file access (and a bunch of other things), but still – just another (a bit esoteric) platform nonetheless. The platform shouldn't care what language you write in, as long as you have a compiler targeting it. I pick my language—any with a compiler that targets the platforms I require—and then I perhaps write different frontends depending on the platform. Maybe on the unices the frontend reads and writes files. Maybe on Windows it's GUI based. And maybe on the browser one interacts with it through DOM manipulation. That last detail shouldn't, IMHO, dictate that the language used. We don't accept that in other situations, so why do we when it comes to the web?
- NohatCoder 4y ago
  > We don't accept that in other situations, so why do we when it comes to the web? Because it is the only thing we have sufficiently sandboxed so that we can actually run it untrusted. I totally get what you want, but we already have a bunch of X-to-JavaScript compilers that pretty much all deliver the experience of: "It works, but it is a bit gnarly, so why would you use this when you can just write JavaScript". And I don't think WebAssembly is going to change that experience much, mainly because it is a pretty poor VM, seemingly designed around the misconception that a lack of features makes it a good compilation target. I honestly think we could give compiled languages a much better time on the web with a new intermediate language, but someone has to design it for that purpose rather than cargo cult Assembly similarity.
  - gspr 4y ago
    > Because it is the only thing we have sufficiently sandboxed so that we can actually run it untrusted. I just don't get why that property couldn't be language-agnostic. Isn't the WASM VM also meant to be sandboxed?

gspr 4y ago

> So you want to avoid the horrors of the web by inserting some language-warping piece of glue code that is guaranteed to only ever get in your way. The irony. No, I in particular want to avoid glue code! > In any case, the DOM and CSS is like 90% of the reason to hate the basic web stack. The other 90% of the reason that people hate JavaScript for is the myriad of frameworks that some people opt to use. You don't have to, and if you come from C you will probably feel right at home not doing so. Perhaps. In my case, it's simply that I abhor the idea that this particular platform requires one specific langauge. I think that's rather dumb. I'd prefer to treat web browsers as just another platform. I do understand that this platform is a bit different from the classical ones (Linux, Windows, Mac, the other unices, take the cartesian product with hardware architectures if you want) in that it doesn't have a notion of file access (and a bunch of other things), but still – just another (a bit esoteric) platform nonetheless. The platform shouldn't care what language you write in, as long as you have a compiler targeting it. I pick my language—any with a compiler that targets the platforms I require—and then I perhaps write different frontends depending on the platform. Maybe on the unices the frontend reads and writes files. Maybe on Windows it's GUI based. And maybe on the browser one interacts with it through DOM manipulation. That last detail shouldn't, IMHO, dictate that the language used. We don't accept that in other situations, so why do we when it comes to the web?

NohatCoder 4y ago
> We don't accept that in other situations, so why do we when it comes to the web? Because it is the only thing we have sufficiently sandboxed so that we can actually run it untrusted. I totally get what you want, but we already have a bunch of X-to-JavaScript compilers that pretty much all deliver the experience of: "It works, but it is a bit gnarly, so why would you use this when you can just write JavaScript". And I don't think WebAssembly is going to change that experience much, mainly because it is a pretty poor VM, seemingly designed around the misconception that a lack of features makes it a good compilation target. I honestly think we could give compiled languages a much better time on the web with a new intermediate language, but someone has to design it for that purpose rather than cargo cult Assembly similarity.
- gspr 4y ago
  > Because it is the only thing we have sufficiently sandboxed so that we can actually run it untrusted. I just don't get why that property couldn't be language-agnostic. Isn't the WASM VM also meant to be sandboxed?