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I think you have a point, and (elsewhere here, among other places: https://brendaneich.com/2007/03/the-open-web-and-its-adversaries/ https://brendaneich.com/200
by BrendanEich 11y ago
I think you have a point, and (elsewhere here, among other places: https://brendaneich.com/2007/03/the-open-web-and-its-adversaries/ https://brendaneich.com/2007/03/the-open-web-and-its-adversa...) I've argued that the Web's open-box nature matters. It's not just an accident or hindrance.
If I'm right, we won't see wasm overused such that the web becomes a sea of monolithic and opaque apps (as too many mobile OS homescreens are). Per the FAQ, wasm is also for hot kernel code and reusable libraries helping mostly-JS apps.
It's up to web devs to keep innovating ahead of browsers, to keep pushing for better HTML, CSS, JS, and beyond. One way to do this might be via wasm modules that extend the web. The https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/ https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/ project continues.
- AriaMinaei 11y agoI think the only way the web could remain mostly-JS apps, is if the benefits of writing mostly-JS apps would outweigh the benefits of writing, well, not-mostly-JS apps. And I'm not sure if that's gonna be true. For example, I'm sitting here, arguing for an open and readable web, and yet I can't wait for a rust-to-asm.js workflow to get stable enough so that I can move the perf-critical parts of my app to rust (you know, the part that could be learned from and hacked on by another developer).
- BrendanEich 11y agoSerious question: why could not those other devs learn from your Rust code, even decompile wasm back into it via their devtools and ye olde view source?
- hacst 11y agoOptimizing compilers.
- BrendanEich 11y agoSometimes you must build with -g. WebDWARF ;-).
- bsimpson 11y agoCan you please clarify? I've seen WebDWARF mentioned twice now, but when I Google, I get a bunch of results about a shareware clone of Dreamweaver.
- filereaper 11y agoDWARF is a debugging data format for ELF files.[1] WebDWARF then would be to WebASM, as DWARF is to ELF files. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWARF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWARF
- bsimpson 11y agoThank you!
- BrendanEich 11y agoI'm suggesting that when debugging optimized code, you'll use -g as on native platforms. I'm speculating further that with wasm, decompilers will rise to the view source challenge.
- AriaMinaei 11y agoBecause the source-map may not be available. And they might not know Rust. Or perhaps having to setup a Rust dev env to play with this code is too much work and it's just not worth it. Anyway, I think I should explain my thoughts better instead of only pointing out a problem. I wrote this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743859