3 ms·

I've seen you comment this on a lot WASM posts (often as a criticism) so I have to ask, as someone who doesn't have knowledge of either, what is bad about this?

I've seen you comment this on a lot WASM posts (often as a criticism) so I have to ask, as someone who doesn't have knowledge of either, what is bad about this? Even if Web Assembly only has a subset of what CLR offers, isn't it a good thing a standard has been created that people are actually able to implement? If Microsoft was not aligned with developers in the early 2000's, that failure is on them.

pjmlp 3y ago
Presenting as if it was the first done anyone has done any of this, UNCOL was the first time such ideas came to be, in 1958. Plenty of historical attempts to dive into, since 1958. Now we have startups redoing Java and .NET application servers, with Kubernetes, WebAssembly, WASI, and YAML spaghetti, because that is so much better. Edge devices running bytecode? That is so last century.
- dartos 3y ago
  What’s old is new again. Edge devices running bytecode has its uses. Being an old idea doesn’t discredit it (neural networks were first described in the 70s) At least WASI is a standard unlike flash or Java applets.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    De facto standard is still a standard.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dartos 3y ago
      Standard may have been the wrong word. Maybe “open spec” or “open standard” is better.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  You're right that the fundamental ideas behind WebAssembly and WASI are not particularly new. The most exciting part about WASI for me, though, is that it's sticking to a capability-based interface and it's actually gaining a lot of traction. There are few examples of capability systems getting as much attention as this.
  - ptx 3y ago
    Do you have any pointers to more in-depth comparisons to Java's security model and some analysis of why wasm should work better? Is the idea mainly that permissions are more fine-grained? It probably makes porting existing applications tricky, though, right?
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  This just seems like an odd way to put people down, though. Some of us are not going to know the origin of most things that we use, but the reason for that is because those things weren't successful and web assembly is (relatively).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    When people are present stuff as new they should have done their research, otherwise we will never get free from the computing fashion industry. It is like microservices bandwagon nowadays, apparently distributed computing "Network is the Computer", computing agents, distributed objects, and service oriented architectures, also failed by the wayside.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      But the new part is that people are implementing it. That seems like an important distinction. CLR did not fail because the idea is inherently flawed.

pjmlp 3y ago

Presenting as if it was the first done anyone has done any of this, UNCOL was the first time such ideas came to be, in 1958. Plenty of historical attempts to dive into, since 1958. Now we have startups redoing Java and .NET application servers, with Kubernetes, WebAssembly, WASI, and YAML spaghetti, because that is so much better. Edge devices running bytecode? That is so last century.

dartos 3y ago
What’s old is new again. Edge devices running bytecode has its uses. Being an old idea doesn’t discredit it (neural networks were first described in the 70s) At least WASI is a standard unlike flash or Java applets.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  De facto standard is still a standard.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dartos 3y ago
    Standard may have been the wrong word. Maybe “open spec” or “open standard” is better.
ryukafalz 3y ago
You're right that the fundamental ideas behind WebAssembly and WASI are not particularly new. The most exciting part about WASI for me, though, is that it's sticking to a capability-based interface and it's actually gaining a lot of traction. There are few examples of capability systems getting as much attention as this.
- ptx 3y ago
  Do you have any pointers to more in-depth comparisons to Java's security model and some analysis of why wasm should work better? Is the idea mainly that permissions are more fine-grained? It probably makes porting existing applications tricky, though, right?
Capricorn2481 3y ago
This just seems like an odd way to put people down, though. Some of us are not going to know the origin of most things that we use, but the reason for that is because those things weren't successful and web assembly is (relatively).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  When people are present stuff as new they should have done their research, otherwise we will never get free from the computing fashion industry. It is like microservices bandwagon nowadays, apparently distributed computing "Network is the Computer", computing agents, distributed objects, and service oriented architectures, also failed by the wayside.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    But the new part is that people are implementing it. That seems like an important distinction. CLR did not fail because the idea is inherently flawed.