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Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Quick Thoughts on WebAssembly

It's happening, all major browsers vendors apparently agreed on WebAssemply effort to bring .wasm files on the web.

I've read enough to give an instinctive, quick, probably premature, surely gut based, impression on this matter.
I'll cut the crap and throw the following bullets at you:
  1. bytecode is nothing new on the Web, it's actually what every Flash developer has been dealing for the last 15 years. On the non web side, LLVM has been one of the most successful target infrastructure "code", something every other non JS language has been hoping to find into the Web and JS platform as a target too. In few words, having an optimized universal language target, can bring only benefits for the entire programming ecosystem. Moreover, this means that JavaScript, or a (sub|super)set of it, will be most likely transpilable to LLVM. This means JS will gradually gain native-like horses power for all the things, including IoT devices. And this is huge!
  2. having all vendors and teams instead of being a proprietary format as it has been for the .swf before, means many more developers and engineers will be involved and happy to jump in. Beside the inevitable higher amount of consequential bikeshed, pattern that reminds me every time of the joke about "How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb?", we have proofs that sometimes this kind of effort works. For instance, the biggest release of ECMAScript since the third edition just got approved and most of the people involved were from all those browser vendors.
  3. asm.js will soon become a widely adopted intermediate target language, since every vendor agreed on .wasm which initial goal is to be compatible with asmjs code. This is huge for Web related performance!
  4. developers will finally be free to choose whatever language they want; transpiling to a more capable infrastructure than just JavaScript as another programming language, and with closer performance to what they expect from their original PL of choice
  5. it will take long time, in terms of cross platform compatibility, before we'll see real-world, full .wasm based applications, and my only hope is that .wasm won't slow down the Web, since this still needs extra attention and huge amount of improvements from every browser vendor
  6. we've got the proof that all people involved or not in Open Source still use "Closed Source" (private) channels to make decisions about "the destiny" of the rest of the world
  7. it might slowly cause the beginning of JS decline once available, since JS has been reforged to be backward compatible, but a fresh new general purpose intermediate language, that could be a better target for new programming languages too, might be a better idea, over a standard that inevitably carries on quirks trying not to break what's been developed for the last 20 years online.
I'm curious to see in 5 years what this little post spoiled, what misunderstood, and still I'm actually quite excited about this .wasm news.

I'm looking forward to see progresses, and contribute as I can!

JS

1 comment:

Unknown said...

First thought: it's simply too soon for judge.

Remember https://xkcd.com/927/

In 5 years probably the web will be something else, with immersive virtual reality 3D games and WebAssembly format, maybe.