alt Hacker NewsNovelty - JS has had more time and effort spent in hardening it, across the browsers, WASM isn't as thoroughly battle-tested, so there will be novel attacks and exploits.
Replies
There is very significant overlap between browsers’ implementation of JS and WASM. For example in V8, the TurboFan compiler works for both JS and WASM. Compilation aside, all the sandboxing work done on JS apply to WASM too. This isn’t NaCl.
> JS has had more time and effort spent in hardening it
JS required the time and effort because it's a clown-car nightmare of a design from top to bottom. How many person-hours and CPU cycles were spent on papering over and fixing things that never should have existed in the first place?
This doesn't even count as a sunk cost fallacy, because the cost is still being paid by everyone who can't even get upgraded to the current "better" version of everything.
The sooner JavaScript falls out of favor the better.
> Novelty - JS has had more time and effort spent in hardening it
Taking this argument to its extreme, does this mean that introducing new technology always decreases technology? Because even if the technology would be more secure, just the fact that it's new makes it less secure in your mind, so then the only favorable move is to never adopt anything new?
Supposedly you have to be aware of some inherent weakness in WASM to feel like it isn't worth introducing, otherwise shouldn't we try to adopt more safe and secure technologies?
On one hand, yes, new attack surface is new attack surface. But WASM has been in browsers for almost a decade now.
That would be more true if WebAssembly didn't share so much sandboxing infrastructure with JS. If anything, I'd argue that WebAssembly is a much smaller surface area than JavaScript, and I think that will still be true even when DOM is directly exposed to WebAssemly.