Wasmtime Now Offering Go Bindings For WebAssembly On The Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wasmtime Now Offering Go Bindings For WebAssembly On The Desktop

With the push for WebAssembly on the desktop for beautiful cross-platform support, the Wasmtime project has added Go bindings to its portfolio...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wasmtime-Go-WebAssembly

[Candy]

Hear hear .... "On The Desktop"

Now go out and search your eggs

[Lycanthropist]

Personally, I hope to see as few web technologies on the desktop as possible. I strongly prefer native applications. Everything else is a waste of CPU cycles.

BTW: Why do I need a Twitter account to vote? Why not just use srawpoll or something similar?

[TemplarGR]

Personally, I hope to see as few web technologies on the desktop as possible. I strongly prefer native applications. Everything else is a waste of CPU cycles.

BTW: Why do I need a Twitter account to vote? Why not just use srawpoll or something similar?

While i also strongly prefer native apps, the "waste of CPU cycles" part is not exactly true. But it is a looong technical discussion and i won't go into that. Just keep in mind that modern cpu architectures spend many, many "cpu cycles" (=energy spent) without a tangible benefit (=information actually processed) anyway, for various reasons. You may not believe it but those higher level modern languages are often free of cost, or even faster in some cases, than lower level languages. It does not seem intuitive, until you begin actually understanding modern hardware.

It all depends on how well designed the runtime is (and the app of course). These days JIT runtimes tend to be ultra fast and virtually at the same level of performance with native compilers. So it is worth it.

[zoomblab]

WebAssembly is a dirsuptive technollogy that is posed to become a cornerstone for future application development on both the client and server environments. It brings together the the benefits of native execution (speed!) with those of the web (portability, linking, convenience).

Anyway the reason for this comment is that I am concerned with a trend that I see lately with some open source projects (e.g., docker). Which is install as such.

$ curl https://wasmtime.dev/install.sh -sSf | bash

WTF? Are we urging now the user to execute bash scripts from the internet? I'm upset every time I see that. What does the install scripts do?

Why can't people in this day and age get off their 'hacker' mindset and do what serious organizations do. Package the damn thing in a friendly for the platform and the user manner. And yes that mandates a GUI.

[oleid]

True, but you can always download the shell script and analyze it.

GUI installers which can write to arbitrary file system positions are not really better.

[Lycanthropist]

TemplarGR
There will always be some overhead with non-native applications. Either during runtime or during start-up. No bytecode or Script language can possibly be as resource-efficient as a native language, since no interpreter or JIT compiler can execute in zero time.

[Veto]

You may not believe it but those higher level modern languages are often free of cost, or even faster in some cases, than lower level languages. It does not seem intuitive, until you begin actually understanding modern hardware.

Ahh, so that is the reason why all the electron and java apps are soo quick, ultra-responsive and instant-launching

It all depends on how well designed the runtime is (and the app of course).

That is a statement that will always be true. However the reality is, that the runtimes are layers upon layers of indirection and the apps are written with a "premature optimization is the root of all evil" mindset.

[cynic]

Ahh, so that is the reason why all the electron and java apps are soo quick, ultra-responsive and instant-launching

Well, startup is only a phase (altough very important) of the life of a program.

I prefer a Java application that takes a bit to start and then runs amazingly fast than a Python one that starts faster and then run slow as hell for all its duration.

[kpedersen]

Just keep in mind that modern cpu architectures spend many, many "cpu cycles" (=energy spent) without a tangible benefit (=information actually processed).

Ah so the JIT interpreter for Wasm bytecode must be really slow because that is native.

Everything has to run on bare metal at some point. The only difference is how many hoops the developer makes the computer jump through first .

I am kinda joking. Wasm is great. It allows me to stick with C and C++ on stupid platforms that favor niche languages. I will take the speed hit just to keep things correct.