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I 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-
by AriaMinaei 11y ago
I 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