alt Hacker NewsI think one the big things with web assembly is it's shear potential is huge.
In theory, WASM could be a single cross platform compile target, which is kind of a CS holy grail. It's easy to let your mind spin up a world where everything is web assembly, a desktop enivornment, a server, day to day software applications.
After I've imagined all of that, being told web assembly helps some parts of Figma run faster feels like a big let down. Of course that isn't fair, almost nothing could live up to the expectations we have for WASM.
Its development is also by committee, which is maybe the best option for our current landscape, but isn't famous for getting things going quickly.
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Well - the problem is... the "in theory" means that nobody will bet on WASM if it is not really going to be useful. People use HTML, CSS, JavaScript - that has been shown to be very useful. WASM is not useless but how can people relate to it? It is like an alien stack for most people.
There’s no reason we shouldn’t be replacing our containers with WASI. Containers are absolutely miserable things that should just be VMs (in the WASM sense, not in the “run Linux in a virtual X86” sense)
The tooling is just not there yet. Everyone is just stuck on supporting Docker still.
I recommend you watch [0] if you haven't seen it yet, it describes the history of javascript, iirc until 2035.
[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
You can use javascript as a single cross platform compile target. What's the difference?
Java and JVM all over again
> WASM could be a single cross platform compile target, which is kind of a CS holy grail.
The JVM says "Hello!" from 1995.
> being told web assembly helps some parts of Figma run faster feels like a big let down.
Not really when tools like Figma were not really possible before it
Like the gifted kid who lives with his mom at 30, at some point in time, we have to stop talking about potential and start talking about results.
Theory and practice doesn't match in this case, and many people have remarked that companies that sit on the WhatWG board have vested interest in making sure their lucrative app stores are not threatened by a platform that can run any app just as well.
I remember when Native Client came to the scene and allowed people to compile complex native apps to the web that run at like 95% of native speed. While it was in many ways an inelegant solution, it worked better than WebAssembly does today.
Another one of WebAssembly's killer features was supposed to be native web integration. How JS engines work is that you have an IDL that describes the interface of JS classes which is then used to generate code to bind to underlying C++ implementations. You could probably bind those to Webassembly just as well.
I don't think a cross-platform as in cross CPU arch matters that much, if you meant 'runs on everything' then I concur.
Also the dirty secret of WebAssembly is that it's not really faster than JS.