[milansuk]

Nice project! I love WASM. It's designed to be sandboxed and portable from day one. I wish WASM was invented instead of Javascript in the 90s. WASM will eat the world.

What I hope most is endurance. There are many programs that we are not able to run anymore. The best examples are probably older games. I hope WASM will change that, although I'm a little bit nervous about adding new features, because simple specs have a higher chance of surviving, but the future of binaries looks exciting.

[cmrdporcupine]

Believe it or not, back in the 90s we thought (on the whole) that web browsers were for browsing hypertext documents. Not for replacing the operating system. There's a reason JS started out limited to basic scripting functionality for wiring up e.g. on-click handlers and form validation. That it grew into something else is not indicative of any design fault in JS (tho it has plenty), but with the use it was shoehorned into. The browser as delivery mechanism for the types of things you're talking about is... not what Tim Berners Lee or even Marc Andreesen had in mind?

Back then "the network is the computer" people ended up shipping thin X clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer in order to do richer applications.

I have very mixed feelings about WASM. There is a large... hype-and-novelty screen held up in front of it right now.

There are many Bad Things about treating the web browser as nothing more than a viewport for whatever UI designer and SWE language-of-the-wek fantasy is going around. Especially when we get into things like accessibility, screen readers, etc.

As for the people treating WASM as the universal VM system outside the browser... Yeah, been down that road 30 years ago, that's what the JVM was supposed to be? But I understand that's not "cool" now, so...

Sigh.

[milansuk]

> Believe it or not ...

I believe and agree with most of you wrote ;)

The main problem with HTML/CSS/JS is programmers want more than these languages offer. With WASM you can pick up language(must compile to .wasm) that fits your use case best. This is the freedom most programmers want.

There will always be programmers who will draw their custom buttons(instead of modifying DOM from WASM) and ignore accessibility. They can do this with JS as well, but most of them don't.

[cmrdporcupine]

The original "sin" is that the browser became the delivery tool for what you're talking about. Whether it's a sin or not is of course a matter of opinion.

But is odd after all these years the browser killed off a big junk of "native" apps on the desktop, but in mobile, there's a whole other story.

Which makes me think the problem all along was about distribution, not technology.

[ebiester]

I keep hoping others see this as well. Sun was so close to the right thing, but the problem is too hard to monetize and it's too vulnerable to embrace, extend, and extinguish.

[cmrdporcupine]

Well, Sun did, I think, couple the JVM the VM too closely to Java the language. And really, on purpose. WASM doesn't make that mistake at least.

But it's also missing, like, a garbage collector and other things that the JVM offered up and did really really well. People are doing dumbass stuff like running garbage collected interpreters inside WASM, inside V8 (which has its own GC) in the browser. It's like nested dolls, just pointless tossing of CPU cycles into the wastebin. Their (or their VC's) money, but jeez.

You can say "oh, that's coming" (GC extensions in WASM) but that hardly inspires confidence because it took 20 years for the JVM to reach maturity on this front. Best case scenario we'll have a decent GC story in WASM in 10.

[pjmlp]

That is always bound to happen, even when bytecode is designed from the ground to support multiple languages, eventually one of them ends up winning as it is too much of mental complexity to always keep moving the platform forward with all of them in mind.

Eventually one of them emerges as the main one, and then there are all the others not necessarly having access to everything like in the early days.

One sees this in the Amsterdam toolkit, IBM TIMI, TDF, and more recently CLR, where it seems to mean C# Language Runtime instead of the original Common Language Runtime, since the .NET Framework to .NET Core transition, and decrease of investment into VB, F# and C++/CLI development and feature parity with C#.

The thing that nags me with WASM is how so many people try to sell it, as if it was the very first of its kind.

[jstimpfle]

> The thing that nags me with WASM is how so many people try to sell it, as if it was the very first of its kind.

I don't get that vibe. Just ask, how do you get to write applications with good, predictable performance, perhaps with multithreading and explicit memory management, in the browser?

It doesn't matter how much of this has existed before in some form or shape. It's ablut the "product" more than it is about grandiose ideas (and the product might not be completely there yet, at least it wasn't some 3 years ago)

[cmrdporcupine]

There are two separate, orthogonal channels of discussion that I think people are poking at.

1. WASM as a browser tech for delivering rich applications inside the browser. On this one I will shrug. I understand the motivation. I don't particularly like it, because my vision of the "web" is not that, but it's a lost battle and I don't have a horse in this race. It's effectively the resurrection of Java applets, but done better, and more earnestly. It's going to solve the kinds of problems you're talking about, I guess, but introduce new ones (even more inconsistency of UX, accessibility features, performance issues, etc.)

2. WASM as a general / universal runtime for server side work. On this, I see a lot of hype, thin substance, a lot of smoke but no fire, and I'm quite skeptical. It looks to me like classic "Have a Hammer, Going to Go find Nails" syndrome. I was initially enthused about this aspect of WASM but I had a job employed working with WASM for a bit and I found a lot to be skeptical about. And while likely will be using WASM in some fashion similar to this for a project I have, I am also not convinced that WASM itself makes a lot of sense as some sort of generic answer for containerization, and looks to me like duplication of effort, claims of novelty where there is none, unhealthy cycles in the tech industry, etc.

Anyways, I think the person you're replying to, and myself, are primarily talking about #2 -- as was the original article

[pjmlp]

All those VC powered companies selling WASM containers in Kubernetes as if application servers weren't a thing 20 years ago, or IBM isn't shipping TIMI execuatbles for decades.

Or talking about how "safe" WASM happens to be, while there are already some USENIX papers slowly making their appearance regarding WASM based attacks.

[paulddraper]

> Especially when we get into things like accessibility, screen readers, etc.

> the JVM was supposed to be? But I understand that's not "cool" now

Both of these criticisms in the same post?

[galangalalgol]

I naively hope the web bifurcates into sandboxed wasm apps and document content that doesn't even need js, much less wasm. I'm not sure what a middle ground would look like or why I'd want it. But the realist in me knows wasm will eat the document content too, meaning adblockers and reader view are doomed...

[josephg]

> meaning adblockers and reader view are doomed

Maybe. As inconvenient as accessibility is, with any luck the need to make web content legible to screen readers will also keep adblockers working. Even with wasm, I don’t think the DOM is going anywhere any time soon. I haven’t seen any proposal to replace it.

[galangalalgol]

You are probably right. Raster frameworks that talk straight to a gl context are out there, eframe/egui is one I've used. And yeah, accessibility is bad. Pair that with encrypted websockets and webTPM which if it isn't a thing, will be, you won't have any control over the chain between the screen and the server.

[k__]

I think, JavaScript (or something similar) was required for this to work. Otherwise the ecosystem would have been infected by something like Java.

[paulddraper]

> Otherwise the ecosystem would have been infected by something like Java

As opposed to the basket of kittens known as JavaScript?

[k__]

Yes.