from Hacker News

WebAssembly First Public Working Drafts

by EddieRingle on 2/15/18, 6:31 PM with 64 comments

  • by Ono-Sendai on 2/16/18, 1:44 AM

    Had a quick look through, looks interesting. Some thoughts

    * Only 32-bit address space (although they do say "Future version of WebAssembly might provide memory instructions with 64 bit address ranges")

    * Webassembly is pretty low level. Just 4 basic types (integers, floats). No C-style structures even. This is lower level than e.g. LLVM IR, and lower level than the Java VM.

    * No garbage collection support.

    I hope Webassembly can be used from not just Javascript, but something like C++, directly.

  • by raisantos on 2/16/18, 8:26 AM

    The asp.net team is already hard at work on the Blazor project a web UI framework using C#/Razor and HTML. https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor

  • by mrashes on 2/15/18, 9:26 PM

    I really love the idea of WebAssembly but am super intimidated by it. Being a junior frontend dev it seems like a really powerful piece of tech that could go in a million directions in the future.

    My big hangup is understanding a low level use case for it. I've console.logged in wasm but only knowing javascript I don't know where to go from here. Is the idea that you can utilize packages in any language then rebuild it in js?

  • by jokoon on 2/16/18, 9:00 AM

    I hope this is the future of the web.

    If the DOM gets accessible from wasm, we'll finally be able to avoid using javascript entirely.

    It's crazy how much time and effort are necessary to finally be able to make a piece of software work on any computer, without having to make different high level graphical API work together.

    The cherry on top would be to have both the dom AND websockets.

  • by mr_overalls on 2/16/18, 4:33 PM

    Is anyone else afraid that this will enable a "Tower of Babel" effect where the coming sheer profusion of languages will fragment web programming into dozens of competing, mutually-incomprehensible linguistic camps.

    Javascript sucks, but at least it's the web's lingua franca.

  • by thefounder on 2/16/18, 12:25 AM

    So you still need JS to load/compile wasm or do anything useful(i.e DOM)...what a disappointment!