alt Hacker NewsLike 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.
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WASM is way way way faster if you need explicit memory management. It's only 100% a wash if you're doing DOM stuff.
As someone with no intersection with the web, it is disconcerting to attend the burial of wasm when she was still getting her first compiler backends.
Also WebAssembly is meant to be a compiler target with the biggest advantage being it's sandboxed. The problem is that the JS engines can do that too. Just like JS engines, WebAssembly can run outside browsers. I think in theory Wasm is better then JS in those areas, but not better enough.
> 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.
This is an entirely unnecessary jab. There’s a whole generation dealing with stuff like this because of economic and other forces outside their control.
Actually the great secret of wasm (that will piss off a lot of people on HN I am sure) is that it is deterministic and can be used to build decentralized smart contracts and Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed systems :)
Some joker who built Solana actually thought Berkeley Packet Filter language would be better than WASM for their runtime. But besides that dude, everyone is discovering how great WASM can be to run deterministic code right in people’s browsers!
I start to think that's why there is still no DOM for the WASM and we have to pingping over JS
> Also the dirty secret of WebAssembly is that it's not really faster than JS.
That is near purely due to amount of work it took to make that shitty language run fast. Naive webassembly implementation will beat interpreted JS many times over but modern JIT implementations are wonder.