alt Hacker NewsI'm definitely excited to see 64 bit as a default part of the spec. A lot of web apps have been heavily restricted by this, in particular any online video editors. We see a bunch of restrictions due to the 32 bit cap today here at Figma. One thing I'm curious though is whether mobile devices will keep their addressable per-tab memory cap the same. It's often OS defined rather than tied to the 32 bit space.
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Unfortunately, Memory64 comes with a significant performance penalty because the wasm runtime has to check bounds (which wasn't necessary on 32-bit as the runtime would simply allocate the full 4GB of address space every time).
But if you really need more than 4GB of memory, then sure, go ahead and use it.
Webapps limited by 4GiB memory?
Sounds about right. Guess 512 GiB menory is the minimum to read email nowadays.
I'm excited by the GC, ref types and JS string API! Been a while J, how are you going?
I assume that looking into the present we need to think about running local LLMs in the browser. Just a few days ago I submitted an article about that [1].
I guess I’m just a crusty ol’ greybeard C++ developer, but it seems like a video editor is out of place in a document browser. There’s a perfectly good native operating system that nobody uses any more.
If we think we need a more thoroughly virtualized machine than traditional operating system processes give us (which I think is obvious), then we should be honest and build a virtualization abstraction that is actually what we want, rather than converting a document reader into a video editor…