Comment on What Happened To WebAssembly
theherk@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Great article. I think wasm is one of the more interesting things to happen in the last few decades in computer science, though there are many. I think it’s here to stay for sure, but am always curious where the adoption curve will go.
jungle@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I don’t know much about wasm, but isn’t it the equivalent of bytecode? That’s just a compiler and an interpreter, how is that a significant development in the last few decades in CS?
theherk@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
It isn’t interesting for being bytecode. Rather for being the first universal sandboxes runtime for the browser and elsewhere. Being able to write in many language and compile to wasm targets is awesome. Safety guarantees and performance are both great too. And it can run in tiny environments.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 7 hours ago
Except that it isn’t really the first iteration of any of those things. Java did most of 'em more than a quarter century ago: browser-embedable, multiple languages could target the JVM, and, yes, sandboxed—the only issue was startup (not runtime) performance. That wasm doesn’t share those startup performance woes makes it useful, but not revolutionary.
As for tiny environments, a typical desktop system from around 1999 is somewhat similar to a Pi Zero W in terms of ability.
theherk@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The sandboxes are different. The embeddable Java plugin sandbox was a bit different and susceptible to confused deputy and other attacks. So yeah, I guess you can say it is iterative but they’re kind of worlds apart. You can run thousands of wasm modules in a single process and have them all be completely isolated. Its performance and security gains, portability, and usability are all superb.
I guess I can’t really defend it well, but I think it is interesting and important.
frongt@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Maybe we should get away from “browser than can run apps” and move towards “app sandbox that also happens to render html”.
Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
It’s kinda cool as in you can compile a bunch of languages to wasm, so instead of being locked to JavaScript (/typescript) you can instead code in e.g. rust, have all the advantages of the compiler and still run in the browser.