4 ms·
Unlike ActiveX, Silverlight, or Flash, it's an open standard developed by a whole bunch of industry players, and it has multiple different implementations (wher
by pdpi 2y ago
Unlike ActiveX, Silverlight, or Flash, it's an open standard developed by a whole bunch of industry players, and it has multiple different implementations (where Java sits on that spectrum is perhaps a bit fuzzier). That alone puts it heads and shoulders above any of the alternatives.
Unlike the JVM, WASM offers linear memory, and no GC by default, which makes it a much better compilation target for a broader range of languages (most common being C and C++ through Emscripten, and Rust).
> Maybe I’m just old, but I thought we’d learnt our lesson on running untrusted third party compiled code in a web browser.
WASM is bytecode, and I think most implementations share a lot of their runtime with the host JavaScript engine.
> In all of these cases it’s pitched as improving the customer experience but also conveniently pushes the computational cost from server to client.
The whole industry has swung from fat clients to thin clients and back since time immemorial. The pendulum will keep swinging after this too.
- DougMerritt 2y ago> The whole industry has swung from fat clients to thin clients and back since time immemorial. The pendulum will keep swinging after this too. Indeed, graphics pioneer and all-around-genius Ivan Sutherland observed (and named) this back in 1968: "wheel of reincarnation "[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again. "Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of Samsara, and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also blitter." https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht...
- justanotherjoe 2y agoThat was why i stopped using the word 'tech' to refer to these things. You don't suddenly go back to stop using the wheel after a time, or suddenly think that printing press was a bad idea after all. Those are techs. Many of the things we call techs nowadays are just paradigms. And frameworks are defnitely not 'new technology'.
- wolvesechoes 2y ago> Many of the things we call techs nowadays are just paradigms More like fads sold to milk even more money from people.
- artikae 2y agoAll it takes for something to be replaced is something that does the job better. You can only really apply your definition in hindsight, after something has stood the test of time. You can't tell the difference between sails and wheels until after the rise of the steam engine.
- anthk 2y agoAlso http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
- pjmlp 2y agoWasmGC is there no matter what, unless we are talking about an incomplete implementation, also plenty of linear memory based bytecodes since 1958.
- pdpi 2y agoWasmGC is a feature you can opt in to, rather than a core feature of the platform. It's more of an enabler for languages that expect a GC from their host platform (for things like Dart and Kotlin). Inversely, other forms of bytecode might have linear memory, but the JVM isn't one of those. For the purposes of OP's question, the memory model difference is one of the key reasons why you might want to use wasm instead of a java applet.