[plurgid]

when we can make web pages, and entire sites without once actually using something a human can disassemble and reverse engineer ... this will be the end of the open web.

truly the complete dead end of it.

Unless maybe I'm missing something. Is a disassembler for WASM a thing yet?

[jchw]

I've tried to read source code from YouTube and let me tell you:

If that kills it, it was already dead. Obfuscation and minification is already as bad as bytecode. Honestly, wasm might be a little better because there are less insane hacks and more simple, if low level, code.

Also, if people are willing to implement DRM in it just because it's bytecode, I'd rather they did that than implemented rootkits in all of the browsers. Thanks for that one W3C.

[steveklabnik]

The ability to preserve “view source” has been a first-class consideration of wasm since the beginning. It’s effectivly the same as JavaScript in this regard.

[krapp]

> when we can make web pages, and entire sites without once actually using something a human can disassemble and reverse engineer ... this will be the end of the open web. truly the complete dead end of it.

No more than it was when Flash was a thing, or Java applets, or Silverlight. The world has been presented with numerous opportunities to turn the web into nothing but binaries, it hasn't happened.

>Unless maybe I'm missing something.

You're missing the part where someone would have to put a gun to everyone's head and force them to rewrite the entire web as WASM blobs, then force all of the browsers to be redesigned, and the servers, so that HTML and plaintext are deprecated, for your doomsday scenario to be even remotely plausible.

[s73v3r_]

I cannot disagree more. Sure, the days of "View Source" might be coming to an end (although I doubt it), but there has never, and I mean never been an easier time to get started with these things. The vast amount of tools and resources for learning available for free is unprecedented. The open web is quite safe for years, if not decades to come.

[mrec]

> Is a disassembler for WASM a thing yet?

Yes, it's part of the standard toolkit. See https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt and specifically the "wasm2wat" tool.

[api]

Webpacked and possibly optimized/minified JavaScript is basically the same thing as compiled code. We are already there.

[ag_dubs]

there's a human readable version, you can read more about it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...