Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by sjrd on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @05:50PM (#14448825)

I don't think WebAssembly will become more common than JavaScript anytime soon. And even when it will be, it means the tooling will have become so good that you won't even have to think about WebAssembly. That will be left to the people who create compilers to WebAssembly.

Hopefully you'll just use whatever language your org/team/etc. uses, and have it compiled to JS or WebAssembly as is most appropriate for said language.

To answer your other question, I most certainly hope we won't see "more Web stuff" built with C++. C++ is a terrible language for that. It's a very good language to do stuff that needs predictable high performance such as games. And games is a good market for C++ in the browser through WebAssembly. But other than that I hope other, more high level languages will pick up.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by k__ on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @06:11PM (#14448973)

I guess the first ones jumping on the WebAssembly wagon will be Web developers, so we will probably get WASM modules written in languages they see appropriate, when JS doesn't cut it anymore.

I guess it will be Rust or Go.

Rust because of Cargo (for npm users a big +) and Mozilla (good marketing of Rust).

Go because of Google (also a Web company with good marketing) and because I read some Node.js developers already switched to Go before WASM.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by meheleventyone on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @03:58AM (#14451002)

A lot of current experiments seem to be the other way around. People with C/C++ projects porting them to WebAssembly. This is partly due to the initial limitations in the current version though.

I'm not a web developer but this has definitely peaked my interest to the point I've been dabbling with WebAssembly. It's really easy to get going so I could see a lot of people with other than WebDev backgrounds getting into application development in the browser.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by jsfitzsimmons on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @07:26PM (#14449396)

Doesn't WASM need GC support before Go can be used? It'll need to be fully managed languages until then, I think.

With that said I'm just parroting some other comments I've seen on this topic in other contexts, so I'm asking the question genuinely.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by dragonwriter on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @07:34PM (#14449434)

> Doesn't WASM need GC support before Go can be used?

Why can't the Go implementation can have its own GC, the same as the Go implementation for, say, x86 does?

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by Houshalter on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @03:42PM (#14455302)

It's possible but will run much slower with some of the restrictions in webasm.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by I_am_tiberius on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @08:29PM (#14449677)

Incredibly interested in the answer to that question as well. Go will not have a future in regards to web development if they don't find a solution for the GC issue in wasm. I assume (and hope) that's a bigger topic compiler-team internally as well currently.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by hooluupog on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @10:09PM (#14450010)

FYI,https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by I_am_tiberius on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @11:15AM (#14453155)

Interesting, thanks

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by steveklabnik on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @10:38AM (#14452862)

Rust already supports compiling to wasm as well.

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Re:Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly by lacampbell on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @06:54PM (#14449231)

I think if the web assembly experiment succeeds it will spawn new languages that become wildly popular. The web is huge, and client side programming is just a different animal.

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