A cartoon intro to WebAssembly

Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by white-flame on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @05:18PM (#13758684)

Off the top of my head:

   - Games
   - Emulator cores
   - Crypto
   - Compression
   - Software graphics
   - Audio processing
   - Computer vision
   - Physics engines
   - Other heavy math/matrix/constraint solvers
   - In-memory databases

Besides games, all of these are library uses, and tend to have fixed structure definitions and often even fixed memory buffers to work with (crypto in particular). The developer is still writing the main application in JavaScript (or whatever other dynamic/GC'd language you wish to compile into JS) and gets the full speed and memory footprint benefit of pulling libraries such as these as opposed to seeking pure JS versions.

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by tannhaeuser on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @06:00PM (#13759066)

    - DRM

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by AgentME on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @09:44PM (#13760504)

If it lives in the relatively restricted sandbox of the browser, then that's not any scarier than DRM written in Javascript in a browser.

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by pdkl95 on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @10:12PM (#13760671)

Have fun writing a new adblocker for each page. Yes, debugging/decompiling is possible, but that is far scarier than the the current situation.

When it's possible to ignore the DOM by uploading your own renderer (e.g. custom freetype/etc compiled to webasm), it's possible to prevent adblocking based on HTML/CSS selectors.

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by AgentME on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @11:29PM (#13761115)

WebAssembly doesn't necessarily mean "do everything in canvases".

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by pdkl95 on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @12:42AM (#13761490)

Of course. Similarly, I doubt Adobe intend for Flash to replace entire websites with over-animated single page apps with terrible usability, but that's how many websites used Flash In the late 90s.

Yes, well-designed sites will use WebAssembly in other more reasonable ways. Entirely separate from that are the websites that try to disable the right-click context menu to "protect" images, and the businesses that are watching there revenue disappear with the rise in adblocking. Some businesses will - often foolishly - use all available means to "protect their content", so that's how they will use WebAssembly.

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[dead]

Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by greglindahl on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @03:08AM (#13762162)

You could make your point without the sarcasm and name-calling.

Presumably you'll be authoring a "NoAss" add-on, following along in the "NoScript" tradition.

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by tannhaeuser on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @04:00AM (#13762351)

Brilliant.

More fecalia-themed names:

AssAssassin

SafeAss

MyAss

OpenAss

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Re:A cartoon intro to WebAssembly by tannhaeuser on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @05:21AM (#13762688)

You can also combine it:

SafeMyAss

OpenMyAss

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