WebAssembly Ends Browser Preview With Initial API & Binary Format

[Michael_S]

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.

Seconded.

I think yszolt has a valid objection - native apps are more efficient. But the problem is, the native apps 99% of the world is using right now work on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. If we shift to more native apps, that just makes it harder for people to move to open source operating systems or even from Windows to OS X or vice versa.

The hope for WebAssembly is that its performance is good enough for wide adoption, and then users can switch between any operating system that has a modern browser without losing their favorite applications. And since Mozilla's asm.js was in 2-3x of C for speed, I suspect WebAssembly will be good enough.

[cj.wijtmans]

Seconded.

I think yszolt has a valid objection - native apps are more efficient. But the problem is, the native apps 99% of the world is using right now work on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. If we shift to more native apps, that just makes it harder for people to move to open source operating systems or even from Windows to OS X or vice versa.

The hope for WebAssembly is that its performance is good enough for wide adoption, and then users can switch between any operating system that has a modern browser without losing their favorite applications. And since Mozilla's asm.js was in 2-3x of C for speed, I suspect WebAssembly will be good enough.

We are in a era where web browsers will replace desktop environments slowly. If WASM is anything successfull we will be running games through the web browser as well. Everything neatly integerated into SystemD and efficient. SystemWASM is born within a few years. SnappWASM for running offline apps.

[speculatrix]

anyone want to weigh in with a prediction of the first root-kitting-by-WebAssembly-drive-by?

I'll give it 4 hours after the first general release of a browser which supports it and the great unwashed public start upgrading to it

[Michael_S]

anyone want to weigh in with a prediction of the first root-kitting-by-WebAssembly-drive-by?

I'll give it 4 hours after the first general release of a browser which supports it and the great unwashed public start upgrading to it

The initial WebAssembly implementations are in Javascript, so any vulnerability of WebAssembly is a vulnerability in your browser's Javascript engine that can be exploited without WebAssembly.

[starshipeleven]

We are in a era where web browsers will replace desktop environments slowly. If WASM is anything successfull we will be running games through the web browser as well. Everything neatly integerated into SystemD and efficient. SystemWASM is born within a few years. SnappWASM for running offline apps.

Come on... stop pulling up systemd where it does not belong. We get you hate it, but this is just stupid.

[starshipeleven]

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

yeah, but if you have a web application that runs more or less the same as a desktop native application, Then there is no reason why you should make a desktop native application for stuff that does not require top performance (like heavy gaming or workstation applications).

[starshipeleven]

I think yszolt has a valid objection - native apps are more efficient.

Native apps like what? Because I think we need to make some differences.
Most modern applications aren't really written in pure C with some assembler optimizations, but in some degenerate bullshit ultra-high-level language that does not really have high performance to begin with, under time pressure and so on. The goal of the "ultra-high-level language" is to sacrifice performance for the sake of reducing development cost.

Cases in point: Skype always sucked hard, even on windows or Android where it should not suck. Office suites are huge terrible monsters while Google Docs runs in a browser and is great, and so on.

But the problem is, the native apps 99% of the world is using right now work on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. If we shift to more native apps, that just makes it harder for people to move to open source operating systems or even from Windows to OS X or vice versa.

Native apps, yes, but they are either not truly cross-platform (a bunch of different applications), or to be cross-platform they suffer lower quality usually.

Running a true application in the browser as a webapplication without having to rewrite the logic in javascript is very interesting for this.
A webapp can pull off a Continuum-like effect pretty easily (good websites do this all the time, it's called "responsive design") without requiring bullshit OS-specific integrations like Continuum, or the limitations of current cross-platform development framewors (that don't support 100% all features of all platforms, more like a 60%).

Then as a very secondary and unintended effect it will also let people on Linux/BSDs use the same apps (assuming the app-browser interface is the same).

[ldo17]

Office suites are huge terrible monsters...

Really? Which one do you use? LibreOffice seems quite good, particularly since they got rid of all that Java code.

[unixfan2001]

Case in point, Visual Studio Professional 2015 sucks my RAM dry whereas I can have 20 unique Visual Studio Code windows at any given time and not see much of a difference in memory utilisation.

The latter also happens to be multi-platform, whereas the former is Windows only.

I couldn't care less about "native".

[starshipeleven]

Case in point, Visual Studio Professional 2015 sucks my RAM dry whereas I can have 20 unique Visual Studio Code windows at any given time and not see much of a difference in memory utilisation.

For the sake of giving some context, VSP2015 is written in C++/.net/C# while Visual Studio Code is web technology running on its own web browser engine (blink, from chromium)