WebAssembly Ends Browser Preview With Initial API & Binary Format

[phoronix]

Phoronix: WebAssembly Ends Browser Preview With Initial API & Binary Format

The WebAssembly project that's the cross-browser effort for low-level programming for in-browser client-side execution has reached a major milestone today. WASM can allow compiling C/C++ among other languages down into code supported by Firefox, Chrome, WebKit, and Edge...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WebAssembly-End-Of-Preview

[caligula]

So what will be the next big web language if everyone targets WA instead of Javascript ?

[ldo17]

So what will be the next big web language if everyone targets WA instead of Javascript ?

There will no longer need to be just one: people will be free to use anything that will compile to WebAssembly.

[Luke_Wolf]

So what will be the next big web language if everyone targets WA instead of Javascript ?

Flash, it'll definitely be Flash

But in all seriousness, if I had to guess it'll be Rust or Python, Rust because it's popular and big news right now and Mozilla's baby, and python because it's the most popular scripting language.

[yzsolt]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser? Web ports of known apps usually sucks, and since the emerge of the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) it has spread like a plague (Atom, Spotify, Skype on Linux, GitKraken, Slack, etc.), so you can't really escape them, because even the "desktop" apps are built with these horribly inefficient technologies. Slow startup times, dead simple apps using hundreds of megabytes of memory, sloppy interfaces and so on. I think that web and desktop apps will converge somewhere in the future, just not with the current technologies. At least I hope so...

[jKicker]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser? Web ports of known apps usually sucks, and since the emerge of the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) it has spread like a plague (Atom, Spotify, Skype on Linux, GitKraken, Slack, etc.), so you can't really escape them, because even the "desktop" apps are built with these horribly inefficient technologies. Slow startup times, dead simple apps using hundreds of megabytes of memory, sloppy interfaces and so on. I think that web and desktop apps will converge somewhere in the future, just not with the current technologies. At least I hope so...

Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple among the others disagree with you. This improves on what we have to get near native speed among the other things. You can't just create something completely new and expect everyone to use it https://xkcd.com/927

[theghost]

Hey, nice finally binary support in browser...~.~

[starshipeleven]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser?

It's not gaming, you dummy. It's more ads. Web needs more ads and browsers must be more powerful to run more, better, more powerful, integrated and user-tracking ads.

Then you also get finally cross-platform applications so MS, Apple and the like can go fuck themselves, but I guess that this is an unplanned side effect of the above.

[Kushan]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser? Web ports of known apps usually sucks, and since the emerge of the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) it has spread like a plague (Atom, Spotify, Skype on Linux, GitKraken, Slack, etc.), so you can't really escape them, because even the "desktop" apps are built with these horribly inefficient technologies. Slow startup times, dead simple apps using hundreds of megabytes of memory, sloppy interfaces and so on. I think that web and desktop apps will converge somewhere in the future, just not with the current technologies. At least I hope so...

It's not for running desktop software in the browser. It's for having similar performance to desktop/native code.

It means next time you use javascript-framework-of-the-day, it doesn't have to be built WITH Javascript.

[mr_tawan]

It would be great if we can replace js file with wasm (eg. .... jQuery in wasm instead of javascript). Many developers do not want to expose their code to users to many reason (IP, security, etc.).