Web Assembly Working Group Charter Approved

Re:Web Assembly Working Group Charter Approved by tyingq on Friday August 04, 2017 @09:43AM (#14928563)

"Each successive version will incrementally incorporate improvements to support more...features such as: Multiple return values, Multiple memories + tables, Threads + shared memory, SIMD, DOM/HTML integration, Garbage-collected object support..."[1]

It does sound like we're headed for some fragmentation here. That list will allow for other scripting languages to run on browsers without having to download a huge runtime, and to interact with the DOM just as JavaScript does. Wasm starts to look more like a multipurpose VM versus looking like ASM.

[1] https://www.w3.org/2017/08/wasm-charter

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Re:Web Assembly Working Group Charter Approved by IshKebab on Friday August 04, 2017 @05:06PM (#14932266)

Your comment makes no sense. Of course it will allow you to use multiple languages. That's the point! Like how you can implement any language using assembly.

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Re:Web Assembly Working Group Charter Approved by tyingq on Friday August 04, 2017 @05:53PM (#14932654)

Sorry, but your comment makes no sense. Those features are needed for some popular languages to work well in WASM. They aren't implemented yet.

Yes, you can hack around and push an entire runtime now. There's a reason nobody is doing that. It isn't practical, performant, or a good experience.

Here's Brendan Eich's quote on the matter:

"Certainly GCC or similar could generate wasm, but I think to get to the dynamic languages, like I mentioned Dart, or Ruby, or Python, even JavaScript — that’s gonna require some extensions that I mentioned earlier, like: garbage collection hooks, JIT support, things like that. Otherwise they just won’t be competitive."

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