4 ms·
> Where are we headed with all of this? We are heading nowhere. Hot take: WASM is a dead technology and has failed to displace vanilla JS. There are only a fe
by dvt 4y ago
> Where are we headed with all of this?
We are heading nowhere.
Hot take: WASM is a dead technology and has failed to displace vanilla JS. There are only a few very niche use cases, most of which have zero product-market fit (e.g., no one wants to play video games in a browser).
Furthermore, no one wants to seriously write C++/Rust/Java and then compile it to WASM. These days, WASM projects are a neat way to pad your resume or get tech "thought leaders" to tweet about you. As far as Extism goes, it sounds like a problem looking for a solution. We already have LUA and JS as embeddable scripting languages, so here we go overengineering yet again.
- jhp123 4y agoyeah I don't understand the hype. Every release of wasmwhatever seems to make the front page here. But the number of real products using the technology seems miniscule. It's been out for many years, if it was going to change the world it seems like it should be making more progress.
- Existenceblinks 4y agoHave some hope on Component Model (this is kinda module system for the whole WASI thing). It wasn't growing because .. bespoke ABI for different langs and bespoke interfaces between host<->guest. Lack of guide too, it's mostly specification which is hard to read.
- pjmlp 4y agoYeah, they keep repacking ideas of bytecode formats that exist for decades, as if it was something novel. Nowadays the whole hype about WASM containers is basically reselling what Java and .NET application servers have been doing for 20 years.
- PedroBatista 4y agoYou are wrong and missing the point. I mostly agree with you and had the same opinion. BUT, the “money” is in the runtime and the real isolation of code and capability based access. Forget about the browser, games, etc ( at least for now) and think about the server, dock and kubernetes. If developers adopt a plug-in model of programming it will be a game changer. I don’t have a crystal ball but that’s what’s fueling wasm right now and it has merits
- galangalalgol 4y agoApp developers wanted it to work. And if apple had allowed it to work in safari like it does on android, it might have made progress.
- flohofwoe 4y agoErm, WASM works just fine on iOS Safari since a very long time now? I can't remember when I dropped the asm.js fallback for my WASM stuff, maybe around 2017/18? And unlike Chrome, the switch from asm.js to WASM actually made a massive performance difference on Safari, because the Safari team never bothered to add special support for asm.js.
- galangalalgol 4y agoYeah, I meant on android you can use it to make a webapp that goes full screen, can be granted position info etc. by the user, and push notifications. A PWA in other words. Apple doesn't want PWAs, as they circumvent control of the appstore.
- dmitriid 4y ago> And if apple had allowed it to work in safari like it does on android, it might have made progress. WASM has been on Safari since version 11 released 5 years ago. Same year it became available on Chrome and Firefox.
- galangalalgol 4y agoYeah, I meant on android you can use it to make a webapp that goes full screen, can be granted position info etc. by the user, and push notifications. A PWA in other words. Apple doesn't want PWAs, as they circumvent control of the appstore.
- dmitriid 4y ago"PWAs" are a dozen different standards. And everyone selects a different subset of them to call "the one true PWA". Apple has supported the absolute vast majority of them since forever. And they have literally nothing to do with doing anything in WASM.