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by krapp 2976 days ago
The existing CSS/DOM layer is for rendering documents.

It can be used to emulate a native GUI, just like languages can "compile" to javascript, and everyone can pretend it's really bytecode. But that doesn't mean this is a good idea, or that an actual bytecode for the web is just reinventing the wheel.

>Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems. Not when it is the whole app.

We don't really know that yet. Everything around Webassembly is still at the preview/POC stage, Webassembly itself hasn't matured and we don't know what sort of tooling, caching or modular integration of code would be feasible within browsers to make downloading software more efficient than just downloading one giant WASM blob.
1 comments
bhouston 2976 days ago
I think that is a fantasy of qt and c++ developers unfortunately. There will be very few use cases for qt in a browser loaded from the web. Optimized computation kernels yes. Full qt guis I do not see it happening.

Qt should create an html/Dom/css front end that binds to the webassembly backend. Would be more efficient and web friendly.

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bitL 2976 days ago
Make Electron-like desktop apps but with Qt or within a browser with navigation/menu etc. bars? Running both over Internet and locally at native speed? Avoiding JavaScript for Web UI? I'd be happy to have that!
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bhouston 2976 days ago
Qt for desktop node sounds like a great idea. Because then it is native and fast. But qt in this case would not be webassembly but rather bindings to JavaScript.
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krapp 2975 days ago
It's a fantasy of mine because I'm afraid that without a way to port and run native code from the web there will be no way to preserve software long term as part of our cultural legacy. Software has to be able to run or else it will be ignored and discarded, preserving source code alone isn't enough. Only things that remain a part of current cultural interest get preserved.
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roywiggins 2976 days ago
This is not what Wt was built for, but there's a similarity...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wt_%28web_toolkit%29

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baq 2975 days ago
There's a whole class of developers who won't touch js and html with a ten foot pole. Suddenly they can deploy software to the browser. What's not to like?
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