3 ms·

> I agree! Sorry, looks like I've misunderstood this part. What I've understood was that GC in WASM "is totally possible right now". Which it isn't. > As ano

> I agree! Sorry, looks like I've misunderstood this part. What I've understood was that GC in WASM "is totally possible right now". Which it isn't. > As another commenter pointed out, wasm-GC is in the implementation phase. Its already supported in Firefox and Chrome, though in both cases behind a feature flag. I don't believe anything meaningful will happen there. The "GC support" was "announced" right at the same time WASM was introduced. Half a decade later, and nothing happened. Even a high-end GC is right there, namely in the JS runtime, and all that would be needed to use it would be handing over a handful of API wrappers. I've read a little bit on that topic last year as I wanted to know about the current state and why it takes forever to implement this triviality. But I can see there are all over the place only stalling tactics… People are coming up with infinite "but"s. Since years now. More or less since the first day WASM exists. I came therefore to the conclusion: This multi-language promise of WASM just won't happen (in any meaningful way). The people behind "the web platform" (Google) are mostly not interested in making web applications just a poor man's "Java WebStart" and "the web platform" just an arbitrary replaceable language runtime. At the very moment you could run any language (and it's ecosystem) on the web there wouldn't be any real initiative to invest into web-apps on "the web platform"—and Google's empire would fall apart. > What does concurrency have to do with any of this? Nothing I guess. :-D I am not a native speaker. I fell for a "false friend"... I wanted to say: "WASM was never meant to be competition to JS in the browser."

josephg 4y ago
> I wanted to say: "WASM was never meant to be competition to JS in the browser." I hear what you’re saying, but there’s no evil javascript lobby group running around trying to stop other languages from becoming viable in the browser. Google doesn’t care - they don’t make less money from advertising if Go becomes a viable language for frontend web applications. Google, probably more than any of the other big tech companies, is led by engineers. And I think lots of googlers really dislike javascript and would love to have other viable options. So why has it taken years to get GC in wasm? After attending a few IETF meetings, I’m increasingly convinced that decisions take time proportional to the number of people in the room. The wasm working group includes all the browser vendors - Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla. and a lot of companies and individuals. That’s going to make any big changes to wasm take longer than everyone wants, even if everyone is on board with the proposal. Rust is suffering from the same thing. Their inclusive decision making process has made language evolution slow to a crawl in the last few years as more and more people have put up their hands to get involved. There’s too many cooks in the kitchen and they’re getting in each other’s way. Another take on this is Hanlon’s Razor: Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Nobody is trying to undermine the GC proposal. It’s just slow going. Implementations exist already (behind feature flags). Hopefully wasm-gc is released before the end of the year. We’ll see.

josephg 4y ago

> I wanted to say: "WASM was never meant to be competition to JS in the browser." I hear what you’re saying, but there’s no evil javascript lobby group running around trying to stop other languages from becoming viable in the browser. Google doesn’t care - they don’t make less money from advertising if Go becomes a viable language for frontend web applications. Google, probably more than any of the other big tech companies, is led by engineers. And I think lots of googlers really dislike javascript and would love to have other viable options. So why has it taken years to get GC in wasm? After attending a few IETF meetings, I’m increasingly convinced that decisions take time proportional to the number of people in the room. The wasm working group includes all the browser vendors - Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla. and a lot of companies and individuals. That’s going to make any big changes to wasm take longer than everyone wants, even if everyone is on board with the proposal. Rust is suffering from the same thing. Their inclusive decision making process has made language evolution slow to a crawl in the last few years as more and more people have put up their hands to get involved. There’s too many cooks in the kitchen and they’re getting in each other’s way. Another take on this is Hanlon’s Razor: Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Nobody is trying to undermine the GC proposal. It’s just slow going. Implementations exist already (behind feature flags). Hopefully wasm-gc is released before the end of the year. We’ll see.