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by dcode 806 days ago
> the Web side is largely complete and successful

Perhaps from a C++ perspective, say a monolith with kilobytes of bindings driving a canvas. Yet

> the original purpose of Wasm

includes, as per the charter, "and interoperate gracefully with JavaScript and the Web", which is far from complete and, thanks to WASI and the Component Model, hardly improving. I guess it will remain a mystery how WASI could basically replace something as obviously useful as WebIDL-bindings - that is, until someone figures out.
2 comments
azakai 806 days ago
> Perhaps from a C++ perspective, say a monolith with kilobytes of bindings driving a canvas.

I get the desire for something more "elegant/clean" in this space, but JS is just very hard to beat on the bindings/glue side. I believe that's why approaches like WebIDL bindings did not turn out to be more efficient. I measured that on both code size and speed in Emscripten, for example, back in the day, and JS was good enough.

With WasmGC it is today possible to ship very small binaries, and the size of the bindings alongside them is generally not an issue, from what I hear from WasmGC-using toolchains like Java, Kotlin, and Dart. In fact they benefit a lot from the flexibility of those bindings, e.g. by being able to pull in random JS things (like strings support, RegExp, etc.).

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triyambakam 806 days ago
Can you elaborate on why you think WASI and the Component Model is ruining that? I am only vaguely familiar with the state of WASM and squinting from this distance it seemed that WASI and the CM were meant to really improve a lot of problems. I'm not familiar with WebIDL bindings
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flohofwoe 806 days ago
The WASM component model looks like it wants to free us from the "C ABI" (yes I know technically there's no such a thing) and give us a "high level language agnostic ABI", but when you take a closer look it's really just a hodgepodge of base types from the Rust stdlib in a trenchcoat, so it basically replaces the "C ABI" with something that's a bit friendlier for Rust coders to work with, but that's about it (at least that's the gist, of course there's a lot more than the ABI spec, but that's also a problem of the Component Model: it lacks focus)
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