I love how WASM is the thing that finally blurred the line between Web and Native programming, formely two realms isolated from each other for a long time. This both develops better awareness of how the code is executed by the hardware, which JavaScript devs often lack, and also brings skilled folks from the Native platforms who seem to be not so against WASM as they were against JavaScript (and all other parts of the Web, really). Maybe this will bear fruit in that people will make more Native user interfaces again.
pjmlp 14 minutes ago [-]
ActiveX, Alchemy, PNaCL,...
gspr 16 minutes ago [-]
I wanted to love it. As someone who hasn't done any web stuff since I was a child, I thought it'd amazing for it to be "just another platform".
I'm a bit disappointed though:
* There's still no way to do DOM manipulation. So then it's tempting to just grab a canvas and draw everything yourself, which of course wreaks on things like accessibility. I'm no fan of the web, but at least it comes with a somewhat agreed-upon way to display graphical stuff – it's a bit of a shame if we're all gonna just treat it like a surface for pixels.
* WASI still leaves something to be desired. Why can't I have raw sockets and file access and stuff, in a POSIX-like way? I understand that sandboxing is important, so this can all be on a per-request-basis, but still. This "just another platform" is still too far from just that.
* The amount of JS glue needed to actually load WASM stuff in the browser is annoying. The idea of needing a bunch of magic "bundlers" is sad.
samiv 9 minutes ago [-]
You can call JS in which you can manipulate the DOM.
Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.
This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.
gspr 1 minutes ago [-]
> You can call JS in which you can manipulate the DOM.
Well sure. But for me, the promise of WASM was to make the browser "just another platform". Now it's "this special platform where you have to access some of the most important functionality through FFI interop with a very high-level, very opinionated language".
> Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.
OK, but like, I wanted the browser to be "just another platform". I don't want to use JS, and I consider HTML orthogonal to my logic. I realize that's not where we're at, but that's what I dreamt of. Hence my disappointment. Which is OK, I don't matter :)
> This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.
It feels the opposite to me.
thewavelength 43 minutes ago [-]
Why is a relatively new technology like WASM being limited to 32-bit pointers? Why repeat the same mistake again?
> Web is 32-bit. Your 64-bit structs will break.
This was the root cause of most of my bugs. WASM is 32-bit address space, pointers are 4 bytes not 8.
whizzter 29 minutes ago [-]
1: Letting your code break on pointer size changes is a quite bad sign imho (it's a sign that many other things are probably done with aliasing,etc and has a high risk of breaking due to undefined behaviour once gcc/clang gets around to utilizing it for an optimization).
2: iirc WASM was initially designed to be shimmable via Asm.JS to force laggards(Apple, Google) to implement it, Asm.JS in turn relied on specific rules in JS to get reliable 32bit arithmetic (but impossible for 64bit).
Wasm64 is implemented and works in Chrome and Firefox.. Apple is lagging again with Safari.
thewavelength 13 minutes ago [-]
Thanks!
1: True, although it also limits the addressable memory and the typical 4GB limit seems less these days. I’m thinking of large apps like Figma running in the browser.
2: Will existing 32-bit WASM binaries break on WASM64 engines or does the binary have a flag for compatibility?
koolala 10 minutes ago [-]
what would make it break? i think the program just calls a 64 bit wasm memory function if it uses the capability
koolala 11 minutes ago [-]
32 is better for a lot of things like simd. the strength of it is wasm can do both types now and js can't unfortunately. a number in js is strictly 64.
unwind 1 hours ago [-]
Meta: a space is missing in the title.
Since this is one of the bugs, I always recommemd writing
It's not 100% better, but it cuts out a few tokens which helps readability and moves the significant asterix further left where I think it's easier to spot.
quietbritishjim 47 seconds ago [-]
Honestly, I think I'm more likely to get your improved form wrong than the original one. This doesn't obviously look wrong to me (maybe because I'm not used to sizeof without brackets, though I know it's valid):
The memory64 proposal was merged into upstream last year, any reason to opt into 32 bit despite that?
sestep 39 minutes ago [-]
It's slower. Wasm32 can just reserve 4 GiB of the virtual address space from the OS for each memory, so checking for out-of-bounds memory accesses imposes no performance penalty. Wasm64 can't do that, so each memory access is a bit slower.
xydone 21 minutes ago [-]
Oh that's interesting, never noticed it in my experience but I have never written anything in wasm where it would matter. Makes perfect sense now that I think about it though. Thanks!
whizzter 29 minutes ago [-]
Apple
koolala 8 minutes ago [-]
they limit some good things on purpose just for the sake of ecosystem competition. but with this they are slowly implementing it?
nhinck3 39 minutes ago [-]
Probably a firefox bug but the interface hit boxes are misaligned when fullscreen
rvz 24 minutes ago [-]
If you are porting anything from C into WebAssembly, keep in mind that you still inherit C based vulnerabilities. [0] [1]
I'm a bit disappointed though:
* There's still no way to do DOM manipulation. So then it's tempting to just grab a canvas and draw everything yourself, which of course wreaks on things like accessibility. I'm no fan of the web, but at least it comes with a somewhat agreed-upon way to display graphical stuff – it's a bit of a shame if we're all gonna just treat it like a surface for pixels.
* WASI still leaves something to be desired. Why can't I have raw sockets and file access and stuff, in a POSIX-like way? I understand that sandboxing is important, so this can all be on a per-request-basis, but still. This "just another platform" is still too far from just that.
* The amount of JS glue needed to actually load WASM stuff in the browser is annoying. The idea of needing a bunch of magic "bundlers" is sad.
Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.
This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.
Well sure. But for me, the promise of WASM was to make the browser "just another platform". Now it's "this special platform where you have to access some of the most important functionality through FFI interop with a very high-level, very opinionated language".
> Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.
OK, but like, I wanted the browser to be "just another platform". I don't want to use JS, and I consider HTML orthogonal to my logic. I realize that's not where we're at, but that's what I dreamt of. Hence my disappointment. Which is OK, I don't matter :)
> This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.
It feels the opposite to me.
> Web is 32-bit. Your 64-bit structs will break. This was the root cause of most of my bugs. WASM is 32-bit address space, pointers are 4 bytes not 8.
2: iirc WASM was initially designed to be shimmable via Asm.JS to force laggards(Apple, Google) to implement it, Asm.JS in turn relied on specific rules in JS to get reliable 32bit arithmetic (but impossible for 64bit).
Wasm64 is implemented and works in Chrome and Firefox.. Apple is lagging again with Safari.
1: True, although it also limits the addressable memory and the typical 4GB limit seems less these days. I’m thinking of large apps like Figma running in the browser.
2: Will existing 32-bit WASM binaries break on WASM64 engines or does the binary have a flag for compatibility?
Since this is one of the bugs, I always recommemd writing
Like this instead: It's not 100% better, but it cuts out a few tokens which helps readability and moves the significant asterix further left where I think it's easier to spot.I like the word "everybug" :-D
[0] https://soft.vub.ac.be/Publications/2022/vub-tr-soft-22-02.p...
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec20-lehmann.pdf