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I’ve been wrestling with WASM bytecode and text format of and on for the last couple years for want of doing something assembly-ish but not wanting to write of

I’ve been wrestling with WASM bytecode and text format of and on for the last couple years for want of doing something assembly-ish but not wanting to write off doing it for the web. Personally, I’d say it’s at least as much of a register machine as a stack machine and ways in which it is one vs the other at times sure had me running in circles. I’ve seen plenty of quotes about how it’s not supposed to be a real assembly, how you’re not supposed to deal with its text format or bytecode, and how it and its documentation are for compiler writers not typical programmers. Which is exactly the take that I think is so wrong with our status quo of opaque, overly abstracted technologies that are highly optimized in their parts yet so disappointing in the whole. As a Forth substitute, I was sorely disappointed. I did learn a lot in my wanderings, and what WebAssembly is mostly is a an implementation to run a C architecture. Which is pretty much what it came from. Not that I’m against that, but I sure ran in circles trying to make it more Forth-like. And given it’s raison d’etre to be more performant vs Javascript it seems to be faster in some benchmarks while slower in others. I think this is more a testament about how optimized V8 and its brethren are then a slam on WebAssembly.

sph 3y ago
I was hyped for WASM as well, but the more I read the spec and standardisation process, the less I am bullish about this as a long-term piece of tech. I would be surprised if it is still around in 30 years (compared to stuff like UNIX, C or even Forth) It's closeness to Javascript and the fact that it's basically managed by companies that want to keep Web as complicated as possible so they can enjoy their monopoly on it, turns me off big time. And lastly, the only thing it has in common with Forth, is being stack-based. Computing has become an unsustainable pile of buggy abstractions on top of one another, and WASM is simply another layer on top this pile of dung, rather than a return to the basics. I get why it wants to give programmers nothing more than a rounded pair of scissors, but then for a glorified VM it's incredibly over-engineered. Art has never been created by a committee of commercial entities. I had in mind to write a OS that runs WASM natively, but these days I'd rather put a persistent, programmable Forth interpreter that gives you full access to the hardware at the lowest level, and build up from there.

sph 3y ago

I was hyped for WASM as well, but the more I read the spec and standardisation process, the less I am bullish about this as a long-term piece of tech. I would be surprised if it is still around in 30 years (compared to stuff like UNIX, C or even Forth) It's closeness to Javascript and the fact that it's basically managed by companies that want to keep Web as complicated as possible so they can enjoy their monopoly on it, turns me off big time. And lastly, the only thing it has in common with Forth, is being stack-based. Computing has become an unsustainable pile of buggy abstractions on top of one another, and WASM is simply another layer on top this pile of dung, rather than a return to the basics. I get why it wants to give programmers nothing more than a rounded pair of scissors, but then for a glorified VM it's incredibly over-engineered. Art has never been created by a committee of commercial entities. I had in mind to write a OS that runs WASM natively, but these days I'd rather put a persistent, programmable Forth interpreter that gives you full access to the hardware at the lowest level, and build up from there.